Cognitive explanations of schizophrenia

Question 1

What are the broad assumptions of the cognitive explanation for SZ?

Answer 1

• Dysfunctional internal mental processes cause dysfunctional thought processes, which overall causes schizophrenia.
• Dysfunctional thought processing= an impairment in selective attention (or an attentional deficit)= they pay attention to everything.
• The cognitive explanation states that patients with schizophrenia experience a disruption to normal thought processing.

Question 2

What is the faulty schema theory?

Answer 2

Hemsley suggested that schizophrenia involves a breakdown between info that has already been stored in memory and new incoming sensory information.
- He stated that when individuals with schizophrenia encounter new situations, their schemas are not activated.
- Therefore they can’t use prior knowledge and experience to process situations quickly/ direct attention.
- They cannot make predictions.

Question 3

What happens as a result of faulty schema?

Answer 3

• This leads to sensory overload and therefore them becoming overwhelmed, as they do not know which aspects of a situation to attend and which to ignore, leading to the symptoms of schizophrenia.
  *SENSORY OVERLOAD- OVERWHELMED- SYMPTOMS!!!
• This is one way of explaining an impairment in selective attention.
• Helmsley stated that their poor integration of memory and perception leads to disorganised thinking and behaviour.

Question 4

What is metarepresentation?

Answer 4

• This is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour.
  1. Insight into our own intentions and goals.
  2. To interpret the actions of others.

Question 5

Failure to metarepresent/ issues of metarepresentation

Answer 5

• Failure to distinguish what is internally generated (‘the self’) and to recognise what is externally generated (external source).
• Failure to metarepresent= no insight into one’s own goals or intentions, and it is hard to interpret the behaviour of others.
• Metarepresentation is a type of metacognition.

Question 6

What are Friths 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processes in patients with schizophrenia?

Answer 6

1. Dysfunctional meta cognition.
2. Issues with central control.

Question 7

1. Dysfunctional meta cognition

Answer 7

• He stated that patients lack the cognitive ability to reflect on their own thoughts and behaviours and that they are unable to recognise whether actions and thoughts are carried out by themself or another person.
• e.g. they are unable to recognise that their hallucinations are in fact just their own inner voice.
• This leads them to attribute what they are hearing to someone else.
• Frith described this as an abnormality of self-monitoring and a failure in meta-representation.

Question 8

Friths research:

Answer 8

• Frith tested this idea by asking patients to decide whether items that had been read out loud were done so by themselves, an experimenter or a computer.
• Patients who had speech poverty as a symptom showed the worst performance on this task.
• Frith suggested that this may be linked to memory and attention difficulties crucial for self monitoring.

Question 9

Evidence for issues with metarepresentation in SZ:

Answer 9

Yellowless
- Developed a machine that produced virtual hallucinations, such as hearing the television telling you to kill yourself.
- The intention is to show individuals with schizophrenia that their hallucinations are not real.
- This suggests that understanding the effectiveness of cognitive deficits allows psychologists to create new initiatives that could improve their quality of life.

Question 10

2. Issues with central control

Answer 10

Frith also highlighted that people with schizophrenia have difficulty performing deliberate actions.
- He stated that issues with the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses lead to central control deficits.
- He stated that this may explain disordered thinking, that an inability to suppress automatic thoughts results in the derailment of intended thoughts.
- He stated that each word in a spoken sentence triggers associations and the patient cannot suppress automatic responses to these.
- This can result in speech poverty.

Question 11

Research to support issues with central control

Answer 11

• Stirling showed that SZ patients perform poorly on the Stroop test.
• This can be explained through poor central control- an inability to suppress the automatic thoughts of what the word is saying.