Cognitive explanation of SZ (Evaluation)

Question 1

(+) Research to support the CE

Answer 1

• Stroop test- research has found that people with SZ find it difficult to perform the Stroop test.
• This test involves naming the colour that the word is written in, rather than the colour that is spelt out.
• This research suggests that people with SZ struggle to have central control, as they can’t suppress automatic responses, and therefore, they tend to quickly read the word by mistake.

Question 2

(-) Issues with research to support

Answer 2

• One weakness is the research used to support lacks ecological validity.
• Bentall found that when recalling a word category task, SZ’s struggled to distinguish between words that they have come up with themselves, and those that they had heard from the researchers.
• This is an artificial task, and may not be effective in supporting the idea of SZ’s failing to metarepresent in everyday settings.

Question 3

(+) Useful applications

Answer 3

• The cognitive explanation has led to the development of Cognitive Behavioural Therapies (CBT).
• Tarrier found that people with SZ receiving 20 sessions of CBT in 10 weeks, coupled with drug therapy, followed by four booster sessions during the next year, had a better reduction in symptoms than sufferers receiving drug therapy alone.

Question 4

(+) Usefulness

Answer 4

• The CE does not provide treatments that can cure SZ, but instead it helps to make SZ more manageable.
• For example, Trower found that CBT did not actually reduce or get rid of hallucinations, but helped patients to feel less threatened by them.
• This means that treatments that are based on CE will not provide an extensive treatment that addresses all symptoms.

Question 5

Alternative explanations (Gottesman)

Answer 5

• Found that the risk of mental illness was much greater for children who had two parents with a diagnosis of bipolar or SZ: 67.5% of offspring who had both parents diagnosed with SZ, had developed a mental health issue by the age of 52.
• The family dysfunction explanation and the CE ignores the impact of the biological causes. This suggests that the psychological explanations are too simplistic.
• It is also difficult to assume that cognitive faults or family dysfunction leads to hallucinations, especially when there is a lot more biological support for the positive symptoms.
• Therefore, an interactionist approach is needed in order to provide the most credible explanation for SZ.