Psychological Explanations - Cognitive Flashcards
What is meant by dysfunctional thought processing ?
- This is a disruption to normal thought processing. These thought processes can be very negative and cause Sz.
- Reduced processing in ventral striatum (responsible for decision making and reward seeking behaviour) is associated with negative symptoms
- Reduced processing in the temporal and cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations
- This lower than usual level of processing suggests that there is cognitive impairments
What did Simon et al find about dysfunctional thinking?
Reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms
Reduced processing in the temporal and cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations
Which psychologist suggested that dysfunctional thinking / thought processing can cause schizophrenia and what does he say the 2 explanations for this are?
Frith et al
- Meta-representation dysfunction
- Central Control dysfunction
What did Frith mean by meta-representation dysfunction ?
The inability to reflect on/ understand their own thoughts as separate from environmental stimuli and the inability to understand the behaviour and intentions of others around them. They are also poor at recognising their own output. They believe that someone else is putting the thoughts into their head which is known as thought insertion (delusion) as they do not recognise that they are their own thoughts. This often leads to auditory hallucinations
What did Frith mean by central control dysfunction ?
- May explain disordered thinking and language deficits such as a lack of fluency when speaking
- The cognitive inability to suppress automatic actions whilst we perform deliberate actions. For example, speech poverty and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic speech and thoughts triggered by other thoughts
What is meant by attention deficit ?
The inability to deny preconscious thoughts which often leaves their mind overloaded. They pay attention to these preconscious thoughts especially those that seem threatening
What did Stirling et al do and what was his findings?
What explanation of Frith does this support?
He used a strop test along with other cognitive tasks and he assessed the cognitive performance of 30 people with Sz and 30 without (control) .
Findings:
- he found that those with schizophrenia took over twice as long to answer correctly
- This supports the central control dysfunction theory as it shows that those with Sz found it difficult to suppress their automatic thoughts and often read the word that they saw out loud instead of the colour
What is a strength of meta-representation ?
p - Supporting evidence
E - Bentall - Had 2 groups (Sz and none Sz) who had to read out category words. Some were provided for them and some they had to think of themselves.
E - He found that Sz struggled to distinguish between the words they were given and those which they came up with
L - This is a strength as it shows that people with Sz have a lack of meta-representation and struggle to distinguish between their own thoughts and those from other people.
Who is the research support for central control dysfunction?
Stirling
What is a weakness of both central control dysfunction and meta-representation ?
P - There’s a lack of cause and effect
E- This is because they both narrow the cause of schizophrenia down to faulty cognition however due to a lack of cause and effect, we dont know that the schizophrenia isnt causing the faulty cognition rather than the other way around.
E - This is a weakness as it means that this explanation lacks validity as it isnt a full explanation. Similaryly, it ignores the biologicical explanation as neurotransmitters and genes also play a part in the development of schizophrenia.
L- Therefore, a weakness of the cognitive explanation is that it lacks cause and effect so we don’t definitely know if faulty cognition causes sz or if its the other way around, reducing the validity of this explanation as it may not be accurate.
