Cognitive Explanation For Schizophrenia Flashcards
What does the cognitive theory of schizophrenia suggest?
-It suggests that schizophrenia may occur due to dysfunctional thought processing. This can be seen through a number of symptoms, for example hallucinations and delusions.
What is inadequate information and how does it affect a schizophrenic?
- It is abnormal information processing that lacks the quality or quantity required to be sufficient for a specific purpose.
- It causes the schizophrenic to have delusions as they jump to conclusions that are usually false as they are unable to process information properly and they also make themselves the central component in any event (egocentric bias) even if the event is irrelevant to them.
What is impaired insight and how does it affect a schizophrenic?
- It is the inability to recognise cognitive disorders and substitute more realistic explanations for events.
- this means they have a false understanding of reality which means they have delusions
What is perception and how does it affect a schizophrenic?
- the ability to see, hear, or became aware of something through senses.
- issues with perception can cause hallucinations. Individuals find it difficult to distinguish between imagery and sensory based perception. As such the two become muddled and individuals then believe hallucinations are real.
What is central control and how does it affect schizophrenics?
- it is the cognitive ability to suppress automated responses while we perform deliberate actions instead.
- Disorganised speech and thought could result from an inability to suppress automatic thought and speech. Sufferers of schizophrenia tend to experience disruption to thought and speech which is a result of cognitive processing occurring when each word triggered associations in the mind and the patient cannot suppress these automatic responses.
What is attention and how does it affect a schizophrenic?
- The ability to filter out irrelevant sensory cues and information from the relevant ones.
- they become overwhelmed with data and their is information overload as a result of the inability to filter out irrelevant cues and information which leads schizophrenics not being able to interpret information adequately and due to this they experience a sensory world different to that of others.
Evaluation of cognitive explanations
- Stirling (30 sz compared to non sz on various tasks including the strop test)
- Gartey (interactionist approach)
- Frith (2 choice task)
Outline how Stirling has supporting evidence for cognitive explanation for schizophrenia
P: Stirling has provided research evidence for the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia.
E: He conducted a study with 30 schizophrenics and 19 non schizophrenics and gave them various tasks to do in controlled conditions including the strop test.
E: He found that schizophrenic patients took twice as long to complete the tasks compared to the control group which suggests schizophrenics have difficulty in cognitive processing which supports the idea that dysfunctional thought processing is the cause for the development of schizophrenia.
Outline how gartey suggests an interactionist approach should be taken when investigating schizophrenia?
P: Gartey suggested schizophrenia is best understood by linking together psychological and biological explanations, with cognitive explanations being the a vital link in the chain. Therefore this suggests the cognitive model alone is not useful but can be used to form part of the overall explanation for schizophrenia. This means we should use an interactionist approach when investigating schizophrenia and not reduce it to a simple explanation as it is a very complex disorder.
Outline how frith supports the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia
P: Frith provides research evidence supporting the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia.
E: He gave schizophrenics and non schizophrenics 2 tasks, where they had to guess whether the next playing card in the pack would be red (R) or black (B).
E:People with schizophrenia produced stereotypical choices like, RRRRR or RBRBRB while non schizophrenics produced more random answers.
L: This suggests that people with schizophrenia have problems generating spontaneous actions, supporting the idea of a lack of central control and dysfunctional thought processing as the cause of schizophrenia.
