Psychological Explanations Flashcards
What are the family dysfunction explanations?
Schizophrenic mother.
The double blind theory.
Expressed emotion.
What is the double blind theory?
Bateson et al described how a child may be regularly trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing, but receive conflicting messages about what counts as wrong. They cannot express their feelings about the unfairness of the situation. When they ‘get it wrong’ the child is punished by withdrawal of love - they learn the world if confusing and dangerous, leading to disorganised thinking and delusions.
What is expressed emotion?
Expressed emotion is the level of emotion (mainly negative) expressed towards the schizophrenia patient and includes:
1. Verbal criticism of the patient.
2. Hostility towards them.
3. Emotional over-involvement in their life.
High levels of expressed emotion cause stress in the patient, a primary explanation for relapse in patients with schizophrenia.
Cognitive explanations of delusions.
During the formation of delusions, the patients interpretations of events are controlled by inadequate information processing. A characteristic of delusional thinking is the degree to which the patient perceives themselves as a central component of events and so jumps to conclusions about external events. This is manifested in the patients tendency to relate irrelevant events to themselves and consequently come to false conclusions. Muffled voices are interpreted as criticising them, and flashes of light a signal from god. Patients are unable or unwilling to consider that they might be wrong. They are considered to to have an impaired insight, an inability to recognise cognitive distortions and substitute realistic explanations for events. This is called meta representations.
Cognitive explanations of hallucinations
Hallucinating individuals focus excessive attention on auditory stimuli and so have a higher expectancy for the occurrence of a voice than normal individuals. Alemen suggests that hallucination prone individuals find it difficult to distinguish between imagery and sensory based perception. For these, the inner representation of an idea can override the actual sensory stimulus and produce an auditory image. Hallucinating patients with schizophrenia are more likely to misattribute the source of self generated auditory experience to an external source than are non-hallucinating patients with schizophrenia.
Support for cognitive explanations: support for different information processing.
Stirling et al compared 30 patients with schizophrenia with 18 controls on cognitive tasks (e.g. In the stroop test participants had to name the ink colour of colour words). Patients took over twice as long as the control group to suppress the impulse to read the word and to name the ink colour instead. This supports Frith’s theory of control control dysfunction. Other evidence also shows that processing differs in schizophrenia patients. However, it is not clear whether these faulty cognitions are merely the proximal cause (i.e. Cause of symptoms) or the underlying cause (i.e. The origins of the disorder).
Limitation of cognitive explanations: biological factors are sometimes overlooked.
Psychological explanations can be hard to reconcile with biological ones (e.g. Genetics). If the biological explanations are valid, how do they fit with psychological ones? Perhaps both biological and psychological factors can separately produce the same symptoms -this raises the question of whether both outcomes are really schizophrenia. Alternatively, we can view this in terms of the diathesis-stress model where the diathesis may be biological or psychological.
Limitation of cognitive explanation: direction of causality.
It remains unclear whether cognitive factors are a cause or a result of the neural correlates and abnormal neurotransmitter levels in schizophrenia. For example, does dysfunctional metarepresentation reduce levels of dopamine in the superior temporal gyrus? Or is the direction of causality the reverse? This questions the validity of the cognitive approach in explaining the underlining origins of the condition.
What is the schizophrenic mother explanation?
Mothers who are cold, rejecting and controlling tend to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy. This leads to distrust which later develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia.
What does cognitive explanations suggest?
That the root cause of schizophrenia is from abnormal information processing. Low levels of information processing in some areas of the brain suggest that cognition is impaired. Eg low activity in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms
What is dysfunctional thought processing?
Lower levels of information processing in some areas of the brain suggest cognition is impaired. For example, reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms.
What is dysfunctional central control?
Dysfunction of central control can explain speech poverty - central control being the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while performing deliberate actions. People with schizophrenia experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers automatic associations that they cannot suppress.
What is metarepresentation?
This is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts or behaviour. This gysfuntion disrupts our ability to recognise our thoughts as our own- this could lead to the sensation of hearing voices (hallucination) and having thoughts placed in the mind by others (delusions).
Limitation for family dysfunction: evidence for family relationships is often retrospective.
Read et al reviewed 42 studies and concluded that 69% of all adult female inpatients with schizophrenia (59% of men) had a history of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood. But most of this evidence is based on information about childhood experiences gathered after the diagnosis. The symptoms may have distorted the patients’ recall of their childhood experiences. This creates a problem with the validity of the evidence.
Limitation of family dysfunction: evidence is weak.
Poor childhood experiences may be associated with schizophrenia, but there is little evidence to support the importance of schizophrenic mothers, expressed emotion or double-blind. These theories are mainly based on clinical observation of patients (open to interpretation). They have also historically led to blaming of other parents already suffering over their child’s symptoms. These issues undermine the appropriateness and credibility of the family-based explanation.
