Psychological Explanations for Schizophrenia AO1 Flashcards
1
Q
What are the two psychological explanations of schizophrenia?
A
- Family dysfunction
- Cognitive explanations
2
Q
What are the family dysfunction explanations of schizophrenia?
A
- The schizophrenogenic mother
- Double-bind theory
- Expressed emotions
3
Q
What are the cognitive explanations of schizophrenia?
A
- Dysfunctional thinking
- Metarepresentation dysfunction
- Central control dysfunction
4
Q
The schizophrenogenic mother
A
- (Reichmann)
- Cold, rejecting and controlling mother
- family characterised by tension and secrecy
- Leads to distrust and paranoid delusions
5
Q
Double-bind theory
A
- (Bateson et al)
- Contradictory family communication (sarcasm)
- child unable to seek clarification on mixed messages
- leaves them with understanding of world as confusing and dangerous
- just a risk factor
6
Q
Expressed emotions
A
- The level of emotion expressed towards person with schizophrenia by carers
- Verbal criticism of person, hostility towards person, emotional over involvement
- high levels of EE = stress to person = explains relapse for people with schizophrenia
- High levels of EE = stress = schizophrenia in vulnerable person due to genetic makeup (diathesis stress model)
7
Q
Dysfunctional thinking
A
- Schizophrenia = disruption of normal thought processing
- reduced thought processing in ventral striatum = negative symptoms
- reduced processing of info in temporal and cingulate gyri = hallucination
8
Q
Metarepresentation dysfunction
A
- (Frith et al)
- Disruption of ones ability to recognise thoughts as their own rather than someone else
- Explains hallucinations of hearing voices and delusions like thought insertion
9
Q
Central control dysfunction
A
- (Frith et al)
- issues with cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions
- Speech poverty and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by others
