Psychological explanation: Cognitive explanations

Question 1

What are the 3 cognitive explanations?

Answer 1

• Dysfunctional thinking.
• Metarepresentation dysfunction.
• Central control dysfunction.

Question 2

Explain the dysfunctional thinking explanation.

Answer 2

• Focuses on the role of mental processes.
• Reduced thought processing in the ventral stratium is associated with negative symptoms.
• Reduced processing in the temporal + cingulate gyri are associated with hallucinations.

Question 3

Explain the metarepresentation dysfunction explanation.

Answer 3

• Identified by Frith et al.
• Metarepresentation: our ability to reflect on our thoughts and actions.
• People with SZ are not able to do this, they are disrupted from being able to recognise these.
• May explain hallucinations of hearing voices.

Question 4

Explain the central control dysfunction explanation?

Answer 4

• Identified by Frith et al.
• Having an issue with surpressing automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions.
• This could explain speech poverty.

Question 5

What is a strength of the these explanations? - Research support, The Stroop test.

Answer 5

• A group of people with SZ and a group of people without took part in multiple tasks, one being the Stroop test.
• People with SZ took over twice as long to identify the font colour due to their central control dysfunction.
• Means cognitive processes are impaired.

Question 6

What is a limitation of these explanations? - Only explain the proximal origin of symptoms.

Answer 6

• They only explain what is happening now to produce the symptoms and not what initally caused the condition.
• These explanations don’t address any genetic variations or childhood trauma which may also be a cause.
• Cognitive exps on their own only provide a partial explanation.