Psychological explanations for schizophrenia Flashcards
What is the schizophrenogenic mother?
Fromm-Reichmann proposed a psychodynamic explanation that said a specific types of mother can cause schizophrenia. This mother is cold, rejecting and controlling and creates a family climate characterised by tensions and secrecy. This leads to paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia.
What is the double-bind theory?
Bateson agreed that family climate is important in the development of schizophrenia and emphasised the role of communication within a family. The child finds itself in situations where they fear doing wrong but receive mixed messages about what is wrong. When they are wrong, the child is punished with the withdrawal of love and leaves the child with the feeling that the world is dangerous. This is reflected in symptoms like disorganised thinking and delusions. However, he was clear that this is only a risk factor.
What is expressed emotion?
The level of emotion, in particular negative emotion, that is expressed towards a patient by their carers. It involves verbal criticism of the patient and occasional violence, hostility, anger and rejection and emotional over-involvement in the life of the patient.
How does expressed emotion explain schizophrenia?
High levels of expressed emotion are a serious source of stress and this is an explanation of relapse for patients. It has also been suggested that it can trigger Schizophrenia in those who are already vulnerable.
What are the 2 types of dysfunctional thought processing identified by Frith?
Metarepresentation and central control
What is metarepresentation?
It is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour and this gives us insight into out own intentions and goals. Dysfunction in metarepresentation means that we are unable to recognise our own actions and thoughts and so this can explain hallucinations and delusions.
What is central control?
It is the ability to supress automatic responses. Disorganised speech and thoughts could result from the inability to supress automatic thoughts and speech.
What are the strengths of psychological explanations of schizophrenia?
Evidence for family dysfunction as in a review of studies it was found that 69% of women and 59% of men with schizophrenia had a history of abuse.
Strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing as compared to controls, schizophrenics performed worse on the Stroop test.
What are the weaknesses of psychological explanations of schizophrenia?
Information about childhood experiences is retrospective and after schizophrenia, meaning thoughts may be distorted.
Weak evidence for family based explanations as there is almost no evidence to support double-bind or the schizophrenogenic mother.
Evidence for biological factors is not adequately considered
Direction of causality is unclear as we don’t know whether cognitive factors are a cause or result of neural correlates.
