4.5. Psychological Explanations for Sz Flashcards
What is a schizophrenogenic mother?
- Fromm-Reichmann (48) noted that many of her patients spoke of a particular type of parent
- Schizoprenogenic mothers -> schizophrenia causing mothers are cold, rejecting and controlling and create a family climate of tension and secrecy.
What is the double bind theory?
- Bateson et al described how a child may regularly be trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing but receive conflicting messages about what counts as wrong.
- Not an innate mental disorder, but a learned confusion in thinking
- When the child gets it wrong, the child is punished by the withdrawal of love - learn world is confusing and dangerous
- This leads to disorganised thinking and delusions
- Leads to difficulties in communication and high levels of interpersonal conflict
- Child doesn’t know how to respond to the conflict between the words and body language
- They can’t express feelings about unfairness of situation
- If child cannot resolve the confusion, then they’re in a double bind situation -> causes confusion and leads to state of internal conflict
- Prolonged exposure prevents development of an internal construction of reality
What is an example of double bind theory?
Mother goes to hug daughter but stiffens when they embrace -> expressing care but stiffening implies she doesn’t like her
What are the three parts that come under expressed emotion?
- Verbal criticism
- Hostility
- Emotional over involvement
What is verbal criticism?
Critical attitudes are combinations of hostile and emotional over involvement.
It shows an opened that the disorder is not entirely in the patient’s control but there’s still negative criticism.
What is hostility?
A negative attitude directed at the patient because the family feels that the disorder is controllable and that the patient is choosing not to get better.
Problems in the family are offended blamed on the patient.
What is emotional over-involvement?
The family member shows a lot of concern for the patient and the disorder.
This is the opposite of a hostile attitude but still has the same negative effect on the patient as it makes the patient feel guilty.
The pity from the relative causes too much stress and the patient relapses to cope with the pity.
What does the expressed emotion theory suggest?
The theory proposes that a high level of expressed emotion within the home of the schizophrenic can:
- worsen the prognosis of patients with Sz
- increases the likelihood of relapse and readmission into hospital for the patient
Strength: evidence linking family dysfunction to Sz
+ Read et al (2005) reported adults with Sz are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment (type C or D)
+ 69% of women and 59% of men with sz have a history of physical and/or sexual abuse
+ Suggests that it can make people more vulnerable.
Weakness: evidence for traditional family based theories
- There is no evidence to support the importance of traditional family based theories e.g. schizophrenogenic mother and double bind
- Both theories are based on clinical observation of patients and informal assessment of the personality of the patients’ mothers
- Means that family dysfunction explanations cannot explain link between childhood trauma and sz
What are cognitive explanations?
- Based around idea of faulty info processing and faulty thinking
- Non-schizophrenic brains are able to filter incoming stimuli and process them to extract meaning
- Thought that these filtering mechanisms and processing systems are defective in brains of schizophrenics.
What are the ideas that come under cognitive explanations?
- dysfunctional thought processes
- metarepresentation = hallucinations
- dysfunction of central control
What are dysfunctional thought processes?
- Lower levels of info in some areas of the brain suggests cognition is impaired -> reduced processing within the ventral striatum is associated with -ve symptoms
- Also explains metacognitions where a person with sz is not aware of their thoughts or what they’re feeling (explains +ve symptoms where they lose touch with reality)
What are metarepresentations?
- Metarepresentations = the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours.
- Frith et al: hypervigilance leads to excessive attention on auditory stimuli and difficulty to distinguish between imaginary and sensory based perception.
- Dysfunction disrupts our ability to recognise our thoughts as our own and leads to the sensation of hearing voices and having thoughts placed in the mind by others.
What is dysfunction of central control?
- Frith et al also identified dysfunction of central control as a way to explain speech poverty -> central control being the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while performing deliberate actions.
- People with sz experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers automatic associations they they cannot suppress
