cognitive explanations for schizophrenia Flashcards
strengths of cognitive explanations
practical applications
CBT and AI- Yellowness et al. developed a machine that produced virtual hallucinations, such as hearing the television telling you to kill yourself or one persons face morphing into another’s to show schizophrenics that their hallucinations are not real. CBT also helps cope with schizophrenia having positive effects on both positive and negative symptoms.
However, time consuming (5-20 sessions) therefore more expensive.
strength of cognitive explanations
research support
Bentall- states that abnormal attention in those with persecutory delusions in schizophrenia (an inability to recognise what is real) is given to threatening stimuli. They are biased towards these stimuli due to a lack of self-motoring. in one sense, they blame their delusions and hallucinations on the outside world or external sources.
Stirling et al.- used the stroop test which can be used to measure a persons selective attention capacity and skills, processing speed, impulse control and alongside other tests to evaluate overall executive processing abilities. He assessed the performance of 30 SZ compared to 30 controls. he found that SZs took over twice as long to answer correctly with a mean time of 123.20s compared to 58.12s for the control group. This supports the explanation as it suggests that people with SZ experience difficulty supressing the tendency to read the words aloud (central control dysfunction).
weakness of the cognitive explanation of SZ
cause and effect
do the symptoms cause faulty cognition or does faulty cognition cause the symptoms? Could childhood trauma cause problems with cognition? or biology?
