psychological explanations for schizophrenia Flashcards
what are the two aspects of the psychological explanation?
•family system theory
•cognitive explanations
what is family systems theory?
refers to process 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 is a preferred term for the family dysfunction theory?
family system theory
what is the schizophrenogenic mother?
•schizophrenogenic means ‘schizophrenia causing’
•proposed by Fromm-Reichmann
•the mother tends to be cold, rejecting and controlling
•this tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy
•this leads to distrust that later develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia
•children need security, lack of this can cause paranoia
who proposed the ‘Double-Bind’ theory?
Bateson (1956)
what is the double-bind theory?
•double-bind is a communication style
•according to the double-bind theory (e.g) a child has repeated experiences with one or more family members in which they receive contradictory messages (like saying something kind in a hostile way)
•repeated exposure to contradictory messages causes the child to resort to self-deception and develop a false concept of reality and an inability to communicate effectively
•this leaves them with an understanding of the world as confusing and dangerous, and this is reflected in symptoms like disorganised symptoms and paranoid delusions
•it is not an explanation, but a feature of family dysfunction
who proposed the high expressed emotion theory?
Brown
what is high expressed emotion?
•research showed that patients with schizophrenia were more likely to relapse if they returned to homes with high levels of expressed emotion
•characteristics of this include verbal criticism of the person, hostility (including anger and aggression) and over involvement in their life
•EE is assessed by taping an interview with a relative of someone with scz and rating them on things like the frequency of critical comments/ dislike/ resentment/ over-involvement
two pieces of research which support the influence of high expressed emotion on schizophrenia relapse
Brown:
•HEE- 58% relapsed
•LEE- 10% relapsed
this is supported by Vaughn and Leff
•9 months after being released
-HEE- 51% relapsed
-LEE- 13% relapsed
higher reliability in research leads to a valid theory
supporting evidence for the family systems theory
+research support, the influence of high expressed emotion is shown by Brown and supported by Vaughn and Leff
limitations of the family systems theory
-direction of causality, we don’t know if the high expressed emotion is a cause or a consequence of living with someone with schizophrenia
-interviews, the emotion expressed in the interview may not believe the same emotion expressed to the family members. it could be catharsis, they want to get stuff off their chest about their family member with schizophrenia
-subjective and biased interpretation of expressed emotion
-parent-blaming,
it is highly socially sensitive because it can lead to parent-blaming, mothers seem to be particularly harshly blamed. parents have to watch their children develop symptoms and shoulder blame. adds unnecessary stress.
what are dysfunctional thought processes?
•information processing that does not represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences
•cognitive deficit theories explain schizophrenia in terms of attentional impairment
•people with schizophrenia tend to perform poorly on tasks such as reaction time, visual tracking, short term memory, size estimation and categorisation
what does disruption in meta representation lead to?
it would disrupt our ability to interpret our own actions thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather then someone else
what is frith’s cognitive model?
•a person with schizophrenia does not have the filter between the two processes (conscious and pre-conscious) , and inconsequential information could be passed into conscious awareness
•therefore unimportant information is interpreted as something significant-
Frith believes this is how delusions are experienced
•if the pre conscious/ conscious filter is defective it is possible that interpretations of non-speech sounds as speech seep into consciousness and are experienced as voices
•he uses biological evidence like the neural correlates (ventral striatum, gyrus, enlarged ventricles)
what diagram was Helmsley’s model based on?
that there was a filter between sensory input and your schemas (stored knowledge)
