Psychological Explanaitions Flashcards
What does the schizophrenogenic mother include?
This is a psychodynamic explanation for schizophrenia.
Freda Fromm- Reichmann (1948) proposed this theory.
Patients often noted particular similar characteristics about their mother such as being cold, rejecting and controlling.
This creates a family environment of secrecy and tension.
This leads to paranoia later developing into delusions and ultimately schizophrenia.
What is family dysfunction?
The presence of problems within a family that contribute to relapse rates in recovering schizophrenics including lack of warmth between parents and child, dysfunctional communication patterns and parental overprotection.
What is the double bond theory?
When a parent sends mixed messages such as telling the child they are a disappointment and then saying they love them which Hinders a child’s ability to respond as one message invalidates another. (Refers to extremes of behaviour)
This prevents a coherent picture of reality developing which leads to schizophrenia symptoms such as flattened affect (lack of emotion) and withdrawal.
What is expressed emotion?
A negative emotional environment.
A high emotional environment of criticism and hostility or over emotional involvement.
Patient returning to a high emotional environment family is 4x more likely to relapse
What are psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
Attribute the origin and development of schizophrenia to psychological causes instead of focusing on a purely biological explanation.
It considers thoughts, emotions and external experiences and how these have affected the patient and their relationships with others such as family and friends.
Evaluation for family dysfunction in terms of the importance of family relationships in schizophrenia.
One study that highlighted this was Tienari’s adoption study.
Findings indicated that adopted children who had schizophrenic biological parents were more likely to develop the disorder themselves than adoptees with non schizophrenic biological parents. However, this difference only occurred when the adoptees with schizophrenic biological parents were homed with sportive parents who had some experience of the disorder.
This suggests that the illness may only manifest itself under appropriate environmental conditions, therefore the development of the disorder may not have been entirely down to genetics making it difficult to disentangle between nature or nurture factors.
Evaluation in terms of evidence to support double bind theory.
There is evidence to support this particular account of how family relationships may lead to schizophrenia.
Research by Berger found that schizophrenics reported a higher recall of double bind statements by their mothers than non - schizophrenics.
However other studies criticise this: liem measured patterns of parental communication in families with a schizophrenic child and found no difference compared to normal families.
However, despite inconsistencies in research support, Gibney suggests that the real value of the double bind theory is that it led to the development of family therapy perhaps preventing such problematic parental communication leading to the enhancement of the development of schizophrenia.
