Cognitive explanations of schizophrenia

• Cognitive explanations of schizophrenia outlines dysfunctional thought processing whereby information is processed differently which is evident in positive symptoms of schizophrenia.
• Frith et al outlined 2 kinds of dyfsunctional thought processing:

  • Meta representation is where individuals can't recognise their own thoughts and actions and often hear these as someone else's voice which can explain delusions and hallucinations.
  • Central control is where people can't suppress their automatic responses to word associations which derails their thoughts and sentences and this can explain speech poverty
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  Research to support this comes from Sarin and Wallin who found evidence of faulty cognition.

  They found delusional patients jumped to conclusions and lacked reality testing.

  Those with schizophrenia had impaired self monitoring and those of whom displayed negative symptoms had low expectations in pleasure and success which provides evidence to show Sz have dysfunctional thought processing which therefore increases the validity of cognitive explanations.
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  Cognitive explanations have practical applications in that they have been used to generate therapies.

  CBT for psychosis makes patients evaluate their delusions and test them for validity.

  Their effectiveness was demonstrated by NICE who found that CBT was more effective than antipsychotics in reducing symptom severity and increasing level of social functioning therefore because the treatment works the theory must be valid.
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  However issues with the explanation is that it's only proximal meaning it only explains current symptoms.

  The explanation can't explain how distal explanations like genetics and family dysfunction lead to problems with meta representation and central control.

  Therefore it is only a partial explanation and lacks the comprehensibility to be a fully valid explanation of schizophrenia.