4 Psychological Explanations Flashcards
Family Dysfunction.
The presence of Problems within a family that contribute to relapse rates in recovering schizophrenics.
Double Blind Theory:
Children who frequently receive contradictory verbal and non-verbal messages from their parents develop incoherent representations of reality, and could develop schizophrenia.
Expressed Emotions:
A family communication style in which family members talk about the patient in a hostile or critical way, or are over-concerned.
Patients returning to high EE families are four times more likely to relapse than those with low EE families.
Patients with schizophrenia may be less able to cope with negative emotional climate.
Cognitive Explanations
People with schizophrenia have dysfunctional thought processing.
Cognitive Explanation of delusions
Individual perceives themselves as central to events.
They interpret irrelevant events such as muffled voices or flashing lights relating to themselves.
Cognitive Explanations of Hallucinations
Hypervigilance leads to excessive attention on auditory stimuli and difficulty distinguishing between imagery and sensory based perceptions.
Evaluation Point: Family Relationships
Adoptive Studies show that genetic vulnerability alone was not sufficient for development of schizophrenia. Children with schizophrenic biological parents were more likely to become ill than those with non-schizophrenic parents, but only when their adopted family was also rated as disturbed.
Evaluation Point: Double Blind Theory
Schizophrenic patients recalled more double blind statements by their mothers than non-schizophrenics.
However patients recall may be unreliable. Other studies find no difference in the agreement between verbal and non-verbal communication in families with or without a schizophrenic member.
Evaluation Point: Individual Differences in vulnerability to EE
Some patients become stressed by EE behaviours whereas others do not. and this affects their outcome in the family.
More resilient patients do not appraise their relatives behavior as stressful and are less vulnerable to it.
Evaluation Point: Supporting evidence for the cognitive model of schizophrenia.
Schizoprhenic patients have impaired self-monitoring and tend to experience their own thoughts as voices.
Negative symptoms are associated with dysfunctional thought processes such as low expectations of pleasure and success.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, used to rest the validity of false beliefs and evaluating the content of voices or delusions, is more effective than antipsychotic medication in reducing symptom severity.
