Psychological explanations Flashcards
Family dysfunction
Poor family communication, cold parenting and high levels of expressed emotion
- Risk factors for the development and maintenance of schizophrenia
The schizophrenogenic mother
Fromm-Reichmann
Psychodynamic explanation
Mother is cold, rejecting and controlling, creating family climate of tension, secrecy and distrust
- Leads to distrust which develop into paranoid delusions
Double-bind theory
Bateson et al
A child is confused by mixed messages in communications and punished by withdrawal of love
- Risk factor rather than cause
Expressed emotion
High levels of verbal criticism
hostility (anger, rejection)
emotional over-involvement (needless self-sacrifice)
- Stress can trigger eg diathesis-stress model
EVAL - research support - family
P - strength as evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia
E - indicators include insecure attachment and childhood trauma
E - Read at al - disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment (type C or D) - 69% of women and 59% of men have history with abuse - Morkved et al - adults with schizophrenia reported at least one childhood trauma
L - suggests family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to schizophrenia
EVAL - explanations lack support - family
P - limited as poor evidence base for any of the explanations
E - none to support the importance of traditional family-based theories such as schizophrenogenic mother and double blind
E - both theories based on clinical observation and information assessment of mother’s personalities not systematic evidence
EVAL - parent-blaming
P - useful even though no research support
E - as shows insecure attachment and experience of childhood trauma affect individual vulnerability to schizophrenia
E - high socially sensitive as parent-blaming, especially the mother
L - for people already having to watch their chilled experience schizophrenia and care for them, blame adds insult to injury
Cognitive explanations
Explanations that focus on mental processes such as thinking, language and attention
Dysfunctional thinking
Disrupted thought processing in ventral striatum (negative symptoms) and temporal gyri associated with hallucinations (positive symptoms)
Metarepresentation dysfunction
Frith et al
Disruption of ability to reflect on own thoughts and behaviour leads to thinking that own actions and thoughts are being carried out by someone else - explains some hallucinations and delusions
Central control dysfunction
Frith et al
People with schizophrenia tend to have derailment of thoughts because a word triggers associations and the person cannot suppress automatic central responses to these
EVAL - research support - thinking
P - strength as evidence for dysfunctional thought processing
E - Stirling et al - compared performance of range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and a control group of 30 without
E - Frith et al’s central control theory supported - people with schizophrenia took longer - over twice as long on average - to complete task
L - cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired
EVAL - a proximal explanation - thinking
P - limited as only explain the proximal origins of symptoms
E - they explain what is happening now to produce symptoms - as distinct from distal explanations with focus on what initially caused the condition
E - possible distal explanations are genetic and family dysfunction explanations - unclear how geentic variation or childhood trauma can lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control
L - cognitive theories on their own only provide partial explanations for schizophrenia
EVAL - psychological or biological
P - cognitive approach provides an excellent explanation for symptoms of schizophrenia
E - argument for seeing schizophrenia primarily as a psychological condition
E - appears that the abnormal cognitive associated with schizophrenia in partly genetic in origin and the result of abnormal brain development - Toulopoulo et al
L - suggests that schizophrenia is a biological explanation
