Cognitive explanations

• Cognitive explanations

  • Focus on the role of cognitive processing on the development of schizophrenia, which is characterised by a disruption to normal thought processing.
• Metarepresentation


  • Describes our cognitive ability to access and reflect on our own thoughts and behaviour, giving us an insight into our own intentions, goals and motivations
  • A disruption in this may mean that we struggle to understand that our thoughts and actions are being carried out by ourselves and not someone else
  • Explaining auditory hallucinations and thought insertions
• Central control

  • Describes the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while performing deliberate actions, such as suppressing thought associations we may have with certain word triggers.
  • A disruption in this central control system could result in symptoms like speech poverty and thought disorder
• Limitations of dysfunctional information processing - 🙁  

  • Despite the abundance of evidence, there is is a problem with cognitive explanations of schizophrenia  
  • There is clear links between symptoms and faulty cognition however, is don't provide insight into the origins of these cognition issues or the origin of schizophrenia  
  • The limitation is that cognitive theories can explain the proximal causes of schizophrenia e.g the current symptoms. However, it can't account for the distal causes e.g the origins of the condition - for this the biological explanation might be better  
• Examples of disruption to normal thought processing

  • Reduced functioning in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms  
  • Reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyri are associated with hallucinations  
• Frith et al (1992)  


  Identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing .

  1. Misrepresentation

  2. central control
• Strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing - 😊  

  P - There is strong evidence for information being processed differently in the mind of schizophrenia patients 

  E - Stirling et al (2006) - Compared 30 people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia to 18 controls on the Stroop test. Patients have name the colour of the ink of coloured words

  A - Those with a schizophrenia diagnosis took over twice as long to name the colours of the ink as the control group  

  L - This is in line with Frith’s theory of central dysfunction in schizophrenic patients.