Cognitive - Dysfunctional Thinking Flashcards
What does the cognitive explanation emphasise the role of?
Cognitive explanations emphasise the role of dysfunctional thought processing in people with schizophrenia. It suggests that they process information differently to those without the disorder.
What are the two types of dysfunctional thoughts?
- Meta-Representation
* Central Control
What is meta-representation?
Meta-representation allows us to reflect on our thoughts and behaviour.
What would happen if there was any dysfunction in meta-representation?
Any dysfunction in meta-representation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else.
What symptoms of schizophrenia could meta-representation explain?
Dysfunction in meta-representation could explain hallucinations and delusions such as ‘thought insertion’ where the sufferer believes that their thoughts are not their own, and that other people are projecting thoughts into their mind.
What is central control?
Central control is the cognitive ability to suppress automatic thoughts (thoughts that just pop up without us having to think about them) while we carry out deliberate actions.
What symptoms of schizophrenia could could result from dysfunction in central control?
Disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress these automatic thoughts and the speech that is triggered by them.
This results in thought derailment where thoughts and speech become incoherent because each word they hear triggers other related words (they are unable to suppress them) which leads to them wandering off the point (thought disorder) or muddling their words (disorganised speech).
Who did investigations into schizophrenic’s ability of perception?
Shin et al
What did Shin et al investigate and what did they find?
Shin et al investigated whether or not schizophrenics differ in terms of perception. To perceive a person’s face we must process the features and configuration in terms of the distance between them. Shin discovered that schizophrenics have difficulty with this process compared to a control group of non-schizophrenics.
What are the implications of Shin’s findings?
The implications of this are that schizophrenics have difficulty identifying expressions on a person’s face and cannot work out their intent. This could explain why schizophrenics have high levels of social dysfunction, as part of the ability to communicate effectively is to be able to read someone’s facial expressions accurately.
EVALUATION - COGNITIVE
Is there any evidence to support cognitive explanations of schizophrenia?
A strength is that there is strong evidence that information is processes differently in the mind of the schizophrenic sufferer.
Stirling et al compared 30 patients with schizophrenia with 18 non-schizophrenic controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop Test (where you have to name the colour that the colour word is written in, therefore suppressing the impulse to read the actual word). In line with the central control theory, patients took over twice as long to name the colour of the ink than in the control group.
EVALUATION - COGNITIVE
Does practical application of cognitive explanations provide evidence for a cognitive bias in schizophrenia?
A strength is that the success of cognitive therapies supports the role of cognitive bias in schizophrenia.
In CBT patients are encouraged to evaluate the content of their delusions or voices to consider ways they might test the validity of their beliefs. A review of treatment by NICE, found that this style of therapy is very effective in reducing symptom severity when combined with drug treatment.
The success of cognitive therapies supports the claim that dysfunctional thinking may contribute to the symptoms of schizophrenia.
Work combines with drug treatment suggests that there is a biological factor.
EVALUATION - COGNITIVE
Does it provide a complete explanation?
A problem with cognitive explanations is that they do not provide a complete explanation for schizophrenia.
The research evidence clearly shows that there is a link between the symptoms of schizophrenia and faulty thinking. However, these links do not actually tell us what caused this difference in thinking.
This is a weakness because cognitive explanations may only tell us about what causes the current symptoms and thus cannot be seen to be explaining the actual cause of schizophrenia.
EVALUATION - COGNITIVE
Are cognitive explanations reductionist?
All psychological explanations for schizophrenia only deal adequately with one aspect of the disorder, in this case cognitive impairment, but fail to account for other factors such as biological and societal factors.
It has been suggested that to gain a complete understanding of schizophrenia we need to consider all factors in the development of the disorder. Thus understanding can be gained through the Diathesis-Stress model which states that biological factors such as genes make us more vulnerable to develop the disorder but the onset of the condition is triggered by stress.
EVALUATION - COGNITIVE
How can cognitive explanation provide a fuller understanding of schizophrenia?
Cognitive explanations can be combined with biological in the Diathesis Stress Model to provide a fuller understanding of the disorder.
Howes and Murray have come up with an integrated model which includes the role of faulty thinking.
They suggest that early vulnerability factors (genes & birth complications) together with exposure to significant social stressors sensitises the dopamine system, causing it to increase the release of dopamine. This increased dopamine leads to biased thinking in terms of hallucinations and delusions. These symptoms lead to further stress for the individual, leading to more dopamine being produced, and more symptoms and so on.
