Cognitive explanations of schizophrenia Flashcards
What are the cognitive explanations of schizophrenia?
-Dysfunctional Thought Processing Due to a Lack of Meta-cognition
-Dysfunctional Thought Processing Due to a Lack of Central Control
What do cognitive explanations of schizophrenia focus on?
-dysfunctional thought processing. -These explanations suggest that errors and biases relating to the interpretation of internal and external information can give rise to symptoms that characterise schizophrenia.
What is meta-cognition and what does it enable an individual to do?
-the cognitive ability for an individual to recognise their own sensations, thoughts and behaviour.
-It enables an individual to understand that these are different to external stimuli and the thoughts and behaviours of others.
What happens if an individual lacks meta cognition?
If an individual lacks this ability, they may not be able to distinguish between internal experiences and external stimuli, which can lead to psychosis.
e.g. an individual generates a thought using their own inner voice, but they don’t realise this is an internal experience, and instead falsely interpret this as the voice of another person despite not hearing the voice as an external stimulus- this is therefore an auditory hallucination (‘hearing voices’) and means the person does not have an accurate perception of reality.
What is central control?
-the cognitive ability for an individual to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead.
-The inability of a schizophrenic to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by external stimuli as well as their own internal thoughts may lead to symptoms of disorganised speech and thought disorder.
-This can involve an individual experiencing derailment (loss of concentration whilst thinking, speaking or listening) because a particular word heard, seen or thought triggers automatic associations to other words and thoughts that cannot be suppressed.