psychological explanations for schizophrenia Flashcards
what are the 3 factors to the family dysfunction explanation
- the schizophrenogenic mother
- double bind theory
- expressed emotion
outline the schizophrenogenic mother
- the mother is cold, rejecting and controlling
- family climate is characterised by tension and secrecy
- this leads to distrust developing into paranoid delusions and schizophrenia
- father is passive
outline the double bind theory
- child fears doing the wrong thing but receives mixed messages
- feel unable to comment on the unfairness and seek clarification
- ‘getting it wrong’ results in withdrawal of love
- confused thinking results in disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions
double bind theory is
just a risk factor not a cause
outline expressed emotion and schizophrenia
negative emotion expressed towards a patient by their carers
- verbal criticism
- hostility
- emotional over involvement
creates a source of stress
- can trigger onset of schizophrenia in a vulnerable person due to their genetic makeup
2 factors of the cognitive explanation
- meta representation
- central control
outline meta representation
cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours allowing us insights into our own intentions and goals
- also allows us to interpret others actions
dysfunction in meta representation
- disrupts our ability to recognise our thoughts and actions as our own rather than someone else
- explains hallucination of voices and delusions like insertion
outline central control
ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions
- dysfunction of central control lead to disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
examples of dysfunctional central control
- sufferers tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and the patient cannot suppress automatic responses to them
a strength of the family dysfunction is that it is supported by research
- theres evidence to suggest that difficult family relationships in childhood are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood
- read reviewed 46 studies of child abuse and schizophrenia and concluded that 69% of women and 59% of men with an in patient diagnosis of schizophrenia had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse or both in childhood
- another researcher also found that adults with insecure attachments to their primary carer are also more likely to have schizophrenia
- there is therefore a large body of evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia, this research provides support for a link between family dysfunction and schizophrenia
a limitation of research into family dysfunction is that most of the evidence shares a common weakness of the data being retrospective
- information about childhood experiences was gathered after the development of symptoms
- the schizophrenia may have distorted patients recall of childhood experiences
- this creates a serious problem of validity
- there is prospective research linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia but not a huge amount and results have been inconsistent
- validity in retrospective data becomes an issue as information tends to be unreliable as it relies on patients recalling information from their past
- recall of childhood relationships may be affected by their schizophrenia
a strength of the cognitive explanation is that we have strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing
- there is strong support for the idea that information is processed differently in the minds of the schizophrenic sufferer
- stirling compared 30 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia with 18 non patient controls
- using the stroop test (naming the colour of words not the word)
- schizophrenic patients took twice as long to name the colours as they couldnt suppress the impulse to read the words in line with friths theory of central control
- this suggests that a lack of central control as the cognitive explanation states has a degree of validity
a limitation of the cognitive explanation is the direction of causality and that its more a description
- the cognitive explanation is more a description than an explanation
- the explanation explains what happens with schizophrenic symptoms but not where it comes from
- why is there a lack of meta-representation and central control
- lacks explanatory power and not a valid explanation of schizophrenia more a description of symptoms
- the family dysfunction or biological explanation are more valid as explanations
