Psychological explanations Flashcards
What are the two main psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
Family dysfunction and Cognitive explanations
What is family dysfunction?
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.
What are the three explanation in family dysfunction?
The schizophrenogenic mother
Double-bind theory
Expressed emotion and schizophrenia
What is the schizophrenogenic mother explanation?
Fromm-Reichmann proposed a psychodynamic explanation for schizophrenia based on childhood accounts of her patients.
According to Fromm-Reichmann the schizophrenogenic mother is cold, rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy. This leads to distrust that later develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia.
What is the double-bind theory explanation?
Bateson agreed that family climate is important but emphasised the role of communication style within a family.
The child finds themselves trapped in situations in fear of doing the wrong thing, with mixed messages of what is wrong. When they get it wrong the child is punished by a withdrawal of love. Creating symptoms such as disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions. Bateson was clear however, that this was only a risk factor.
What is the expressed emotion and schizophrenia explanation?
EE is the level of emotion, in particular negative emotion, expressed towards a patient by their carers.
- Verbal criticisms of the patient, and violence
- Hostility, including anger and rejection
- Emotional over-involvement, needless self-sacrifice
These cause stress and is primarily an explanation for elapse in patients with schizophrenia. It has also been suggested to trigger the onset of schizophrenia in a person who is vulnerable.
What is the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing.
Reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms.
Reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyri are associated with hallucinations.
What is dysfunctional thought processing?
A general term meaning information processing that is not functioning normally and produces undesirable consequences.
How did Christopher Frith link dysfunctional thought processing to schizophrenia?
He identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms of schizophrenia; metarepresentation and central control
What did Christopher Frith say metarepresentation was?
The cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours. This allows us to interpret not only our own actions but also the actions of others.
Dysfunction in metarepresentation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as ours not others.
This would explain hallucinations.
What did Christopher Frith say central control was?
The cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead.
Disorganised speech and thought disorder could result form inability to suppress automatic thoughts.
For example, sufferers with schizophrenia tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences.
What is the evaluation for psychological explanations of schizophrenia?
Support for family dysfunction as a risk factor
Weak evidence for family based explanations
Strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing
Direction of causality
Evaluation point for psychological explanations of schizophrenia: Support for family dysfunction as a risk factor
Read et al reviewed 46 studies of child abuse and schizophrenia and concluded that 69% of adult women patients who had schizophrenia had a history of abuse and for men it was 59%.
However a weakness of this is that information about childhood experiences were gathered after the development of symptoms and may have been distorted.
There is evidence linking abuse to schizophrenia, but not a huge amount and it is inconsistent.
Evaluation point for psychological explanations of schizophrenia: Weak evidence for family based explanations
There is almost no research to support the schizophrenogenic mother and double-bind theory. Both were based on clinical observation and an out of date approach.
Another problem with family explanations is that they lead to parent blaming. Parents who already suffered seeing their child with this condition had their trauma worsened by being blamed.
Evaluation point for psychological explanations of schizophrenia: Strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing
Sterling compared 30 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia with 19 controls on a range of cognitive tasks. The participants had to name the ink colours of colour words. In line with Frith’s theory, the patients took over twice as long to complete the task.
The issue however is that whilst there are links between schizophrenia and faulty cognition, it doesn’t explain the origins of these cognitions.
