Psychological Explanations

Question 1

Family Dysfunction

Answer 1

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

Question 2

The Schizophrenia mother
Frieda Fromm-Reichma (1948)

Answer 2

Frieda Fromm-Reichma (1948) Proposed a psychodynamic explanation for Schizophrenia based on the accounts she heard from her patients about their childhoods

Question 3

Frieda Fromm-Reichmna (1948)
Findings?

Answer 3

Many of her patents spoke of a particular type of parent

Schizophrenogenic mother is cold, rejecting, controlling and dramatic

Leads to distrust, later turns into paranoid delusions

Question 4

Double-bind theory: Who proposed this theory?

Answer 4

Gregory Bateson et al (1972)

Question 5

Double bind theory: Gregory Bateson et al (1972)

What was said?

Answer 5

Family climate is important in the development of schizophrenia, but emphasised the role of communication.

The child seeks fear due to situation there tapped in. Child unable to seek classification and when they “get it wrong” the child is punished with withdrawal of love.

This leaves the child with the belief that the world is dangerous and confusing leading to disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.

Question 6

Expressed Emotion

Answer 6

Verbal interactions the caregiver has with the person of schizophrenia

Question 7

Expressed Emotion: Exaggerated involvement

Answer 7

Indicating the sufferer is a burden via self-sacrifice. “I do so much for you, it’s hard for me”

Question 8

Expressed Emotion: Criticism and Control of the sufferers behaviour

Answer 8

“You don’t know how to do anything, you need to listen to me more and do as you are told”

Question 9

Expressed Emotion: Hostility

Answer 9

Towards the sufferer, physical, verbal or emotional suggesting rejection

“You’re a total waste of space”

Question 10

Expressed Emotion: AO3
(1998):

Answer 10

Butzlaff and Hooley (1998): showed using a meta-analysis of 27 studies that relapse into schizophrenia is significantly more likely in families that have issues with expressed emotion

Question 11

AO3 Family dysfunction

Answer 11

Supporting research on the influence of family dysfunction comes from Tienari (2004) who studied the biological children of schizophrenic mothers who had been adopted. It was found that 5.8% of those adopted into psychologically heathy families developed schizophrenia, compared to 36.8% of children raised in dysfunctional families. This suggests that the interpersonal family environment has a significant impact on the development of schizophrenia in genetically vulnerable people

Question 12

Cognitive Explanations For Schizophrenia are based on?

Answer 12

The assumption that the ability to process thoughts is dysfunctional.

Question 13

Cognitive Explanations for Schizophrenia

Firth’s (1979) “attention deficit theory”

Answer 13

Suggests Schizophrenia is due to a “ Faulty attention system” unable to filter preconscious thought and gives too much significance to the information that would usually be filtered, therefore overloading the mind.

This accounts for positive symptoms of schizophrenia such as:
Delusions
Hallucinations

Question 14

What did Firth also suggest?

Answer 14

Suggested the ability to supress and override automatic actions and speech and make deliberate actions to achieve goals (Central Control) is sometimes faulty in schizophrenic patients.

The Schizophrenic patient can have difficulties resisting urges and have difficulty explaining the reason as to why, resulting in delusions.

Speech derailment can also be explained by the inability to resist expressing automatic thoughts.

Question 15

What does Meta-representation mean?

Answer 15

The ability to identify your own thoughts and actions as your own by paying attention to them.

Faults in this system results in delusions of control, the feeling that your own actions are being created by an outside force

Question 16

AO3 Support (Cognitive Explanations)

Answer 16

Firth 1992 supported these ideas with biological/cognitive neuroscience studies. 30 Schizophrenia patients with the various symptoms had PET scans. These scans indicated a reduction in blood flow in the frontal cortex with patients with neagtive symptoms like Avolition and the inability to supress automatic thoughts. Also the sancs showed increased activity in an area of the temporal lobe responsible for the retrieval of memories with patients with reality distortion. This suggets that there are biological differences in schizophrenics brain regions associated with the theorised cognitive processes.;

Question 17

A03 Support (Cognitive Explanations)

Answer 17

Stirling et al (2006) conducted the Stroop test was conducted on 30 patients with schizophrenia and 18 control patients. This involved naming the ink colours on words without saying the word. This is difficult as there is a desire to say the words that needs to be controlled. Stirling found that patients with Schizophrenia took twice as long to name the colours as the controls. This suggests that patients with Schizophrenia do have dysfunctional thought processing, in this case with faulty central control.

Question 18

AO3 Support (Psychological explanation )

Answer 18

Family therapy reduces expressed emotion in families, this has been demonstrated to be an effective intervention and supports the family dysfunction argument

Question 19

AO3 Support (Psychological explanation )

Answer 19

As cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis can be an effective treatment this indicates that cognitive factors are involved in the disorder.

Question 20

AO3 Limitation (Psychological explanation )

Answer 20

It is socially sensitive to suggest that schizophrenia is caused by the family, parents are already dealing with the difficulty of their relatives behaviour. Theorists may be adding additional stress and anxiety by making the family think they are responsible

Question 21

AO3 Limitation (Psychological explanation )

Answer 21

Impossible to demonstrate cause and effect: it could be that schizophrenia of the child and associated behaviour is the cause of family dysfunction.

Question 22

AO3 Limitation (Psychological explanation )

Answer 22

There is a significant amount of research evidence that schizophrenia has a biological cause such as genetics (Gottesman) and neurotransmitters (Leucht) family dysfunction might act as a trigger but t can be argued the basic cause is biological