lesson 7 - Psychological explanations for Schizophrenia – Cognitive explanations including dysfunctional thought processes Flashcards
what is the cognitive approach to schizophrenia
- The cognitive approach to schizophrenia focuses on internal mental processes and thoughts.
- Schizophrenia patients’ tend to have cognitive impairments such as poor attention, dysfunctional thought processes and language deficits.
- Central control deficits may explain disordered thinking and language deficits, e.g. lack of fluency and word salads
- Dysfunctional/maladaptive thinking/information processing can be linked to developing positive schizophrenic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions.
frith theory
- Frith stated that cognitive factors are associated with the development of schizophrenia.
- Symptoms such as delusions of control and auditory hallucinations might occur because individuals with schizophrenia have issues with self-monitoring and inadequate information processing. They cannot track their own thoughts properly.
- They often claim that their thoughts are, “alien” or “not their own” and they often have dysfunctional thought processes and are unable to recognise these cognitive distortions (cognitive biases).
- Schizophrenia patients are poor at recognising their own output, e.g. their own drawings
- Schizophrenia patients are poor at understanding their own thinking (metacognition) as distinct from environmental stimuli
what is metarepresentation
Metarepresentation is the ability for a person to reflect on thoughts and experiences. 3 factors of metarepresentation can help explain the symptoms of schizophrenia and how the illness develops. Schizophrenics tend to suffer from:
1) Inability to generate voluntary action
2) Inability to monitor voluntary action
3) Inability to monitor the beliefs and intentions of others
Frith said that schizophrenic patients’ are unable to distinguish between actions brought about internally (from their own mind) or externally (generated from other people). Many schizophrenic patients’ are not sure where their thoughts and actions stem from e.g. themselves, the environment, from others etc
explain frith’s theory
- He gave schizophrenic and healthy participants a two choice task.
- Had to guess whether the next card in a pack was either Red (R) or Black (B).
- Schizophrenia patients tended to produce stereotypical choices such as RRRRRRRR or BBBBBBBB or BRBRBRBR.
- Healthy participants’ tended to produce more random choices such as RRBRBRRRB.
- The research suggests that schizophrenic patients’ have problems generating immediate actions, and this supports the idea that they have a lack of self-control which is caused by cognitive impairments.
strengths of frith study
1) The cognitive approach has the strength of providing a reasonable account of how the positive symptoms of schizophrenia develop. The cognitive approach highlights why schizophrenic patients’ develop symptoms of hallucinations and delusions; this is because they experience metarepresentation (+)
6) The cognitive model can be praised and has many strengths. The psychological research is usually conducted as a laboratory experiment, which means that it is highly controlled, scientific and objective. This allows psychologists to accurately manipulate the independent variable and see the effect on the dependent variable e.g. schizophrenia (+)
weaknesses of friths study
2) Frith’s ideas about metarepresentation have been criticised for being Reductionist. Frith is taking the complicated illness of schizophrenia and he is reducing it down to being caused by three basic ideas of metarepresentation which are at the level of individual cognitive symptoms. (-)
3) The cognitive model can be criticised because it does not explain the underlying cause of schizophrenia which is mainly biological (genes and neural correlates). The cognitive model only explains some aspects of how people with schizophrenia think and ignores other approaches to the illness (-)
4) A criticism of the cognitive approach is that cause and effect has not been made very clear. Could dysfunctional thought processing cause schizophrenia to develop? Or could it be that schizophrenia sufferers develop dysfunctional thought processes as a result of the illness? (-)
5) The cognitive approach can be criticised because it seems to give a list of the symptoms that schizophrenic patients’ will develop as a result of their illness. However, the cognitive model is not very clear at explaining exactly what causes schizophrenia. (-)
explain hemsley theory
Hemsley (1993) Cognitive causes of Schizophrenia – schemas and dysfunctional thoughts (AO1)
* Healthy people have a good combination of perception and memory, but schizophrenic patients have a poor combination of these, (especially poor memory function)
* Schizophrenic patients have a breakdown between stored information in their long term memory (schemas) and new incoming information/data.
* Stored information is used to create schemas allowing individuals to interpret and deal with current situations e.g. a schema about what to expect when going to a restaurant
* Schizophrenia patients suffer from a breakdown in their cognitive processing. They cannot access their schemas or aspects of long term memory.
* They might experience sensory overload, and cannot decide what aspects to concentrate on and what to ignore. This can result in disorganised and delusional thinking and behaviour
strengths of hemsleys theory
Evaluation of Hemsley’s theory: (AO3)
1) The nature/nurture debate can be considered in relation to the cognitive approach. Could it be that dysfunctional thought processes causes schizophrenia and this is due to the environment/upbringing? Or, could it be argued that the cognitive model links more to the nature side of the debate, whereby faulty and dysfunctional thinking could be caused by biological reasons (- and +).
3) Research conducted by Stirling (2006) found evidence to support the idea that schizophrenic patients process information differently compared to normal people. 30 schizophrenic patients were compared to 18 controls and were given cognitive tasks (the Stroop test). It was found that schizophrenic patients had a central control dysfunction and took twice as long to name the colours in the test than the control group. (+)
weaknesses of hemselys theory
1) The nature/nurture debate can be considered in relation to the cognitive approach. Could it be that dysfunctional thought processes causes schizophrenia and this is due to the environment/upbringing? Or, could it be argued that the cognitive model links more to the nature side of the debate, whereby faulty and dysfunctional thinking could be caused by biological reasons (- and +).
2) A criticism of the research by Hemsley is that ethical issues need to be considered when using schizophrenia patients’ in research. They may be unable to give their fully informed consent to take part in research. There is also the risk of psychological harm and patients might feel uncomfortable being observed or tested for their cognitive functioning. Some schizophrenia sufferers might also wish to withdraw from research, but not know how to do this effectively (-)
4) The cognitive approach gives a very good explanation of how dysfunctional thoughts can lead to schizophrenic symptoms developing. However, not all schizophrenics actually suffer from dysfunctional thoughts so therefore the cognitive approach is limited in explaining the causes of schizophrenic (-)
5) A disadvantage of the research is that Beck and Rector focused on a complex interaction of neurobiological, environmental, behavioural and cognitive causes of schizophrenia. An abnormality in brain functioning (biological) could cause schizophrenia, which in turn can increase a person’s vulnerability to stressful experiences which leads to dysfunctional thought processes (cognitive causes). Cognitive causes alone, do not cause schizophrenia (-)
