Psychological Explanations

Question 1

Family Dysfunction - Psychodynamic

Answer 1

• Emphasises role of parents in development
• Freud = you need mother’s input to overcome oral and anal stages
• SZ patients fail to prioritise stimuli and believe everything is about them

Question 2

Family Dysfunction - Bowlby

Answer 2

• You need consistent, warm, and reciprocal interactions with mother to develop healthy IWM - this is what you use to interpret the world
• SZ patients sytematically misinterpret others’ intentions as well as environmental stimuli

Question 3

Bateson et al (1965) - Double Bind

Answer 3

• Contradictory messages are responsible for SZ children
• Eg. if your mother says she loves you while physically punishing you, reality can become confusing
• We learn about the world when young from role models & experience - we won’t be able to construct coherent reality in our minds

Question 4

Fromm & Reichmann (1948) - Schizophrenogenic Mother

Answer 4

‘A cold, rejecting, and secretive mother creates a family environment that makes paranoia perfectly reasonable. The constant fear of persecution, if generalised, will be diagnosed as [SZ]’

Question 5

Kuipers et al (1983) - Expressed Emotion

Answer 5

• Families with high ‘emotional expression’ can trigger SZ episodes
• These families describe SZ relatives in hostile, critical terms
• EE levels in family/friends is strongly correlated with relapse rates

Question 6

Noll (2009) - Expressed Emotion

Answer 6

• Negative emotions can trigger SZ episodes in vulnerable people
• Supportive environments may be protective

Question 7

Cognitive

Dysfunctional Thought Processing

Answer 7

• Cognitive explanation for SZ
• Cognitive habits or beliefs that cause the individual to evaluate information inappropriately and produces undesireable consequences

Question 8

Cognitive

Frith et al (1992) - Metarepresentation

Answer 8

• Cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours, allowing us insight into our own intentions/goals
• Dysfunction disrupts our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than by others
• Explains auditory hallucinations/delusions

Question 9

Cognitive

Frith et al (1992): Central Control

Answer 9

• Cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions
• Dysfunction leads to disorganised speech - unable to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
• Eg. SZ patients’ derailment of thoughts & spoken sentences - each word triggers associations, patient can’t suppress automatic responses to them

Question 10

Cognitive

Beck & Rector’s Stages

Answer 10

1. Cognitive Processing Biases = Hyperdopaminergia in/around MLP
2. Misattribution of consequences to causes = Hypodopaminergia in ACG & PFC
3. Failure to test reality with memory or logic = DLPFC - Hippocampus link atrophy or dysfunction (glutamate)

Question 11

Cognitive

Delusions - Explanation

Answer 11

1. Inadequate information processing
2. Egocentric bias
3. Failure to contextualise events
4. Patients unable to perform ‘reality testing’ (Beck & Rector, 2005)

Question 12

Cognitive

Hallucinations - Explanation

Answer 12

1. Hypervigilance
2. Higher expectancy of voices
3. Can’t distinguish between sensory info and internal images (Aleman, 2001)
4. Misattribute source of internal images to external sources (Baker & Morrison, 1998)
5. Don’t see disconfirming evidence - don’t reality check
6. Patients unable to perform ‘reality testing’ (Beck & Rector, 2005)