Psychological Explanations Flashcards
Who did research on the schizophrenicgenic mother?
Fromm-Reichman
What is the schizophrenicgenic mother explanation based on
Psychodynamic explanation based on accounts from parents based on childhood.
What are the characteristics of a schizophrenicgenic mother, and how does this lead to schizophrenia?
Cold, rejecting and controlling
Causes family tension and secrecy. Leads to paranoid delusions.
Describe Bateson et al double bind theory
Child in constant fear of doing wrong thing after receiving mixed messages, feel unable to comment on unfairness and seek clarification. When they get it wrong, child punished by withdrawal of love. Believe world is dangerous and confusing- reflected in disorganised thinking and delusions.
Explain expressed emotion explanation (EE)
Level of emotion, particularly negative emotion expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by carers/ parents. Verbal criticism, occasionally accompanied by violence.
Hostility towards a person (anger and rejection)
Emotional over involvement including self sacrifice
High EE= stress= relapse
One strength of family dysfunction as an explanation for schizophrenia is support (AO3)
Read et al: adults with schizophrenia more likely to have insecure attachment (C or D). Reported worth 69% women and 59% men with schizophrenia have experienced physical and or sexual abuse.
Strongly suggests link
One limitation of family dysfunction as an explanation of schizophrenia is lack of support (AO3)
Even though plenty of evidence suggesting link there is none into schizophrenicgenic mother or double bind theory. These are based on clinical observation and informal observation of mothers. Cannot fully account for a link.
Describe how dysfunctional thinking in brain areas leads to schizophrenia
Reduced thought processing in ventral striatum associated with negative symptoms.
Reduced processing info in temporal and cingulate gyri associated with hallucinations.
(Simon et al) lower than usual level of information processing suggests cognitive impairment.
What happens when there is dysfunction in metarepresentation.
Frith et al: interrupts own ability to recognise own actions and thoughts. Explains hearing voices and delusions like thought insertion.
Describe central control dysfunction
Frith et al: speech poverty and thought disorder could result from inability to suppress automatic and speech triggered by others.
One strength of cognitive explanations is the support (AO3)
Stirling et al: compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and 30 people as a control. Stroop task: took people with schizophrenia twice as long as average. Impaired cognitive processes.
One limitation of cognitive explanations is it is only a proximal explanation (AO3)
Only explain proximal origins of symptoms.
Only explain what is happening now to produce symptoms, compared to distal explanations which focus on what initially caused the symptoms/ disease.
Unclear how genetic variations or childhood trauma may lead to problems with eg. Meta representation.
Cognitive only a partial explanation.
