COGNITIVE EXPLANATION FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA Flashcards
Can you summarise the cognitive explanation of schizophrenia?
Firth (2015) suggested the schizophrenia may involve cognitive disortions that result in schizophrenic symptoms.
1. Faulty self-monitoring leads to hallucinations.
2. Misinterpreting perceptions leads to delusions.
3. Problems with understanding other’s intentions and problems with spontaenous actions lead to avoilition and social withdrawal.
What is the cognitive explanation for hallcuinations?
Schizophrenics may experience abnoramility of self-monitoring. Which is when people fail to recognise their inner speech as their own thoughts, which may lead to the false recognition of inner speech as external voices (auditory hallucinations)
What was the aim/ result of Frith’s 2015 experiment on self-monitoring?
Aim: To test whether patients with schizophrenia can accurately identify the source of spoken words (themselves, someone else, or a computer).
Result: Patients with disorganised speech as a symptom performed the worst (disorganised speech maybe caused by memory and attention difficulties, this is a problem as memory and attention (checking and controlling thoughts and behaviour) are important for self-monitoring
What is the cognitive explanation for delusions?
- Delusions arise from misinterpretations of perception. For intance, they might have a hallucination (like hearing a voice) and try to make sense of it using logic, but their logic is distorted leading to misinterpretations, like believing the hallucination is real which is a delusion.
- These failures in self-monitoring can lead to specific delusions such as (delusions of alien control, thought insertion).
- Misunderstanding others thoughts and intentions can also lead to delusions (paranoid delusions)
Experience (hallucination) -) misinterpretation/flawed logic-) delusional thinking. If you hear a voice (hallucination), and believe it’s someone spying on you,
you might develop a paranoid delusion — all because you assumed the voice was real.
How does the cognitive explanation describe avolition in schizophrenia?
Avolition may be caused by difficulty generating spontaneous actions as schizophrenics may need prompts from others/external sources to make desicions on how to behave/ what to do. E.g They may find it difficult to start a conversation (spontaneous action) without first being prompted.
This spontaneous action difficulty may be linked to impairments in the theory of mind which can create problems in recognising the intensions of others.
What is the cognitive explanation for flattened affect, lack of speech, social withdrawl?
Difficulties monitoring ones own mental state and the states of others
Name 1 strength and 1 weakness of the cognitive explanation?
- Strength= It has led to the development of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which helps patients challenge and manage faulty thinking — showing practical application.
- Weaknesses= Reductionist as it mainly on internal mental processes and ignores social or emotional factors that could also play a role (trauma) of biological causes.
