Psychological explanation Flashcards
1
Q
What is the psychological explanation for schizophrenia?
A
- there are a range of psychological explanations for schizophrenia
- some of these have focused on the psychological environment, in particular the family and its role in making individuals particularly vulnerable to schizophrenia
- others have focused more on the mind of the sufferer emphasising the role of abnormal cognition in the experience of schizophrenia
2
Q
What is family dysfunction?
A
- psychologists have attempted to link schizophrenia to childhood and adult experience of living in a dysfunctional family (family dysfunction)
- abnormal processes within a family such as poor family communication, cold parenting and high levels of expressed emotion
- these may be risk factors for both the development and maintenance of schizophrenia
3
Q
What is the study of the schizophrenogenic mother?
A
- From-Reichmann proposed a psychodynamic explanation for schizophrenia based on the accounts she heard from her patients about their childhoods
- Fromm-Reichmann an noted that many of her patients spoke of a particular type of parent, which she called the schizophrenogenic mother
- schizophrenogenic literally means schizophrenia-causing
- according to From-Reichmann the schizophrenogenic mother is cold, rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy
- this leads to distorts that later develops into paranoid delusions i.e. the belief that one is being persecuted by another person and ultimately schizophrenia
4
Q
What is the double-blinds theory?
A
- Batson et al agreed that family climate is important in the development of schizophrenia but emphasised the role of communication style within a family
- the development of schizophrenia but emphasised the role of communication style within a family
- the developing child regularly finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing, but receive mixed messages about what this is and feel unable to comment on the unfairness of this situation or seek clarification
- when they get it wrong which is often the child is punished by withdrawal of love
- this is reflected in symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions
- Batson was clear that this was neither the main type of communication in the family of schizophrenia-sufferers nor the only factor in developing schizophrenia, just a risk factor
5
Q
What are examples of family dysfunction?
A
- the schizophrenogenic mother
- double-bind theory
- expressed emotion and schizophrenia
6
Q
What is expressed emotion and schizophrenia?
A
- expressed emotion is the level of emotion, in particular negative emotion, expressed towards a patient by their careers
- EE contains several elements
- verbal criticism of the patient, occasionally accompanied by violence
- hostility towards the patient, including anger and rejection
- emotional over-involvement in the life of the patient, including needless self-sacrifice
- these high levels of expressed emotion in careers directed towards the patient are a serious source of stress for the patient
- this is primarily an explanation for relapse in patients with schizophrenia
- however it has also been suggested that it may be a source of stress that can trigger the onset of schizophrenia in a person who is already vulnerable, for example due to their genetic make-up the diathesis-stress model
7
Q
What are the cognitive explanations of schizophrenia?
A
- a cognitive explanation for any phenomenon is one which focuses on the role of mental processes
- schizophrenia is associated with several types of abnormal information processing, and these can provide possible explanations for schizophrenia as a whole
- schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing
- we can see this in many of its symptoms
- we have already seen that reduced processing in the central stratum is associated with negative symptoms, whilst reduced processing of information in the temporal and consulate gyro are associated with hallucinations
- this lower than usual level of information processing suggests that cognition is likely to be impaired
- Christopher Frith et al identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms
8
Q
What are the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia?
A
- metarepresentation
- central control
9
Q
What is metarepresentation?
A
- the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour
- this allows us insight into our own intentions and goals
- it also allows us to interpret the actions of others
- dysfunction in metarepresentation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else
- this would explain hallucinations of voices and delusions like thought insertion which is the experience of having thoughts projected into the mind by others
10
Q
What is central-control?
A
- the cognitive ability to supress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead
- disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to supress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
- for example sufferers with schizophrenia tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and the patient cannot supress automatic responses to these
11
Q
What is dysfunctional thought processing?
A
-a general term meaning information processing that is not functioning normally and produced undesirable consequences
12
Q
What are the evaluation points of psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
A
+support for family dysfunction as a risk factor as 60% of men studies with schizophrenia had childhood trauma
-schizophrenohenic mother’s and and double bind leads to victim blaming and there’s no supporting evidence
+syrup test shows that sufferers of schizophrenia have dysfunctional information processing as they took twice as long to bake the ink colours of colour words
+real life application of family therapy can reduce expressed emotion to improve patients lives
13
Q
How does support for family dysfunction as a risk factor support psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
A
- there is evidence to suggest that difficult family relationships in childhood are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood
- for example Read et al revived 46 studies of child abuse and schizophrenia had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse or both in child hood
- for men the figure was 59%
- adults with insecure attachments to their primary career are also more likely to have schizophrenia
- there is thus a large body of evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia
- however most of this evidence shares a weakness
- information about childhood experiences was gathered after the development of symptoms and the schizophrenia may have distorted patients’ recall of childhood experiences
- this creates a serious problem of validity
- a much smaller number of studies have been carried out prospectively i.e. they followed up children following childhood experiences to see if the childhood experience predicted any adult characteristics
- there is prospective evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia but not a huge amount and results have been inconsistent
14
Q
How is weak evidence for family-based explanations a weakness of psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
A
- although there is plenty of evidence supporting the broad principle that poor childhood experiences in the family are associated with the adult schizophrenia, there is almost none to support the importance of the schizophrenogenic mother or double blinds
- both these theories are based on clinical observation of patients and early evidence involved assessing the personality of the mothers of the patients for crazy-making characteristics - an approach that makes many modern psychiatrists wince
- another problem with dysfunctional family explanations for schizophrenia is that they have led historically to parent-blaming
- parents who have already suffered at seeing their child’s descent into schizophrenia and who are likely to bear lifelong responsibility for their care, underwent further trauma by receiving the blame for the condition
- this is literally adding insult to injury
- in fact the shift in the 1980s from hospital to community care, often involving parental care, may be one of he factors leading to the decline of schizophrenogenic mother and double blinds theories - parents no longer tolerated them
15
Q
How does support for dysfunctional information processing support psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
A
- there is strong support for the idea that information is processed differently in the mind of the schizophrenia sufferer
- in one study Stifling et al compared 30 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia with 18 non-patient controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroup test in which participants have to name the ink colours of colour words, suppressing the impulse to read the words in order to do this task
- in line with Froth’s theory of central control dysfunction, patents took over twice as long to mane the ink colours as the control group
- although there is a mass of evidence like this to show that information processing is different in the mind of schizophrenia sufferer, there is a problem with cognitive explanations for schizophrenia
- links between symptoms and faulty cognition are clear; however, this does not tell us anything about the origins of those cognition or of schizophrenia
- links between symptoms and faulty cognition or of schizophrenia
- cognitive theories can explain the proximal causes of schizophrenia i.e. what causes current symptoms but not the distal causes i.e. the origins of the condition
