Cognitive Approach Description

Question 1

Explaining Positive Symptoms

Answer 1

Morrison suggests that maldaptive thinking can explain why some individuals suffer with auditory hallucinations.
Triggers such as sleep deprivation can lead to hearing voices in maldaptive ways, resulting in the individual appraising them innapropriately.
Negative commands from the critical voices can lead to behaviours such as self-harm and social withdrawal- reinforcing the messages from the critical voices.

Question 2

Lack of Preconscious Filter

Answer 2

Frith suggests that positive symptoms can be explained by difficulties in inhibiting preconscious content caused by faulty preconscious filters.
1. Senses receive info from environment and interpret it (pre-con)
2. Info— Conscious and makes sense of it.
3. Problems with filters that inhibit the pre-con info can result in awareness of ambigious info + multiple interpretations of event - Acting in an appropriate way becomes difficult.

Question 3

Explaning negative symptoms

Answer 3

Beck et al: drew cog triard (previously used to explain depression) to offer a model of negative symptoms.
Individual w/ neg symptoms holds dysfunctional beliefs about their performance and ability to experience pleasure.
This results in a negative view about the future.
This can lead to individual displaying neg symptoms such as anhedonia and avolition.