L7: Psychological Explanations - Cognitive Explanations

Question 1

What did Frith suggest?

Answer 1

Individuals with schizophrenia have issues with:

• Self monitoring
• Information processing.
• Tracking their thoughts
• Recognising cognitive distortions

They have dysfunctional thought processes

Question 2

What is metarepresentation?

Answer 2

• The ability to reflect on thoughts and experiences
• The factors can help explain symptoms and how the illness develops
  The factors are
  1) Inability to generate voluntary action
  2) Inability to monitor voluntary action
  3) Inability to monitor beliefs and intentions of others
• Patients are unable to distinguish between actions brought about internally or externally. They are not sure where their thoughts and actions stem from

Question 3

What research did Frith carry out?

Answer 3

• He gave participants two choice task.
• They had to guess if the next card was red or black
• Schiz patients produced stereotypical responses
• Healthy Ppts produced more random choices
• Suggests that Schiz patients have more issues generating immediate actions, supporting the idea that they have a lack of self control caused by cognitive impairment

Question 4

Evaluation of Frith

Answer 4

(+) Approach provides reasonable account of how the positive symptoms develop. It explains why patients develop positive symptoms - because of metarepresentation
(+) The model is praised because the research is a lab experiment which is highly controlled and objective, increasing validity
(-) Metarepresentation has been criticised as reductionist as it takes a complicated illness down to 3 basic ideas
(-) It is criticised because it explains how positive symptoms develop but not how negative symptoms develop
(-) It is criticised for not establishing cause and effect

Question 5

What did Hensley state?

Answer 5

• Healthy people have a good combination of perception and memory but Schiz patients do not
• Schiz patients have a breakdown between stored information in long-term memory and new information
• Stored information creates schemas which help with interpreting situations.
• Schiz sufferers have a breakdown in their cognitive processing - they cannot access schemas or some of their LTM
• Schiz sufferers might have sensory overload - they can’t decide what to ignore/concentrate on= disorganised thinking

Question 6

Evaluation of Hemsley’s theory

Answer 6

(-) There is evidence to say that patients process information differently. 30 patients were compared to 18 controls and were given cognitive tasks. The patients had central control dysfunction and took twice as long.
(-) The approach gives a good explanation of how dysfunctional thoughts lead to symptoms developing but not all patients suffer from dysfunctional thoughts so it is limited in explaining the causes.
(+/-) The nature nurture debate can be considered. Do dysfunctional thought processes cause Schiz due to environment/upbringing or is it nature where dysfunctional thinking is caused by biological reasons
(+) Research focused on a complex interaction of neurobiological, environmental, behavioural and cognitive causes of Schiz. An abnormality in brain functioning could cause Schiz, increasing vulnerability to stressful experiences, leading to dysfunctional thought processes.