psychological explanations for schizophrenia

• Family dysfunction

  Refers to processes within a family such as poor family communication, cold parenting and high levels of expressed emotion. These may be risk factors for both the development and maintenance of schizophrenia.
• Cognitive explanations

  Explanations that focus on mental processes such as thinking, language and attention.
• Dysfunctional thought processing

  Information processing that does not represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences.
• psychological explanation - family dysfunction

  • schizophrenogenic mother
  • double-bind theory
  • expressed emotion
• Family dysfunction - schizophrenogenic mother

  • Fromm-Reichmann - psychodynamic explanation based on accounts she heard from her patients about their childhoods
  • spoke of a particular type of parent
  • Schizophrenogenic mother - cold, rejecting and controlling
  • creates a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy
  • distrust - develops into paranoid delusions - into schizophrenia
• Family dysfunction - double-bind theory

  • Bateson - family climate is important in the development of schizophrenia but emphasises role of communication style
  • mixed messages about what is wrong
  • When they get it wrong child is punished by withdrawal of love
  • world = confusing and dangerous
  • disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions
  • risk factor
• Family dysfunction - expressed emotions

  • level of emotion expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by their carers
  • verbal criticism of the person - violence
  • hostility towards the person - anger and rejection
  • emotional overinvolvement - needless self-sacrifice
  • serious sources of stress for the person - relapse or trigger for people with genetic vunerability
• AO3 - family dysfunction - strength

  P: evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia

  E: indicators of family dysfunction - insecure attachment and exposure to childhood trauma

  Read - adults with schizophrenia are likely to have insecure attachment

  69% of women and 59% of men have a history of abuse

  L: family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to schizophrenia
• AO3 - family dysfunction - limitation

  P: poor evidence base for any of the explanations

  E: the schizophrenogenic mother and double bind are based on clinical observation of people with schizophrenia and also informal assessment of their mothers' personalities

  E: Not based on systematic evidence so there is no evidence to support the theories

  L: no been able to account for the link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia
• psychological explanations - cognitive explanations

  • dysfunctional thinking
  • metarepresentation dysfunction
  • central control dysfunction
• cognitive explanations - dysfunctional thinking

  • disruption to normal thought processing
  • reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum - negative symptoms
  • reduced thought processing in the temporal and cingulate gyri - hallucinations
• cognitive explanations -

  • Frith - two kinds of dysfunctional thought processes:
  • metarepresentation dysfunction
  • central control dysfunction
• cognitive explanations - metarepresentation dysfunction

  • metarepresentation - the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour
  • allows insight into our own intentions and goals and to interpret actions of others
  • dysfunction in this would disrupt ability to recognise our actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves - not someone else
  • hallucinations of hearing voices
  • delusion like thought insertion
• cognitive explanations - central control dysfunction

  • issues with the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions
  • speech poverty and thought disorder - result from the inability to suppress automatic thought and speech triggered by other thoughts
  • derailment of thought - word triggers associations
• AO3 - cognitive explanations - strength

  P: evidence for dysfunctional thought processing

  E: Stirling - compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and a control group of 30 people without schizophrenia

  • Stroop task - ppts name the font colours of colour words - suppress tendency to read words aloud

  People with schizophrenia took longer to name the font-colours

  L: cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired
• AO3 - cognitive explanations - limitation

  P: only explain the proximal origins of symptoms

  E: they explain what is happening now to produce symptoms - not what initially caused it unlike genetic and family dysfunction

  E: Doesnt explain how genetic variation or childhood trauma might lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control

  L: only provide partial explanations for schizophrenia