Psychological explanations for schizophrenia Flashcards
What are the psychological explanations for Schizophrenia?
Family dysfunction
Dysfunctional thought processing.
In the 50’s and 60’s it was thought that people suffering from schizophrenia were from what?
Dysfunctional families.
What does the term ‘schizophrenogenic family’ mean?
Was used to describe families with high emotional tension, many secrets, close alliances and conspiracies.
What is expressed emotion?
Expressed emotion is a family communication style that involves criticism, hostility and over-concern.
What is high levels of expressed emotion predicted to cause?
High levels of expressed emotions are likely to influence relapse rates.
The negative emotional climate in these families seems to arouse the patient and leads to stress beyond his or her already impaired coping mechanisms.
How is expressed emotion assessed?
By taping an interview with a relative of someone with schizophrenia and rating the frequency of critical comments, the frequency of expressions of dislike towards the patient, and the frequency of expression of over-protectiveness towards the patient.
What research supports the concept that a patient returning to a family with high expressed emotion is likely to replace a patient?
Linszen found that a patient returning to a family with high expressed emotion is x4 more likely to relapse than a patient whose family has low expressed emotion.
What was Subotnik 0’2 study into schizophrenia and expressed emotion?
Subotnik gave 100 schizophrenics’ parents a Thematic apperception test. This test asks people to view a picture of a scene and describe their thoughts and feelings about the people pictured.
The researcher then measured how critical and hostile their communication style is.
What did subtonic conclude from his study into schizophrenia and expressed emotion?
subtonic found that mothers of schizophrenic were particularly likely to be critical/hostile even though these mothers showed no sign of schizophrenia themselves.
He concluded that mothers can pass on schizophrenic genes to offspring despite showing no sign of the disorder themselves.
Can it be argued that expressed emotions are actual the result of the severely disturbed individual?
Yes, studies of expressed emotion may reflect the consequences of living with a severely disturbed individual, rather than having any causal significance.
I.e. it may be the patient’s mental health problem which causes the family to become high expressed emotion.
What can high expressed emotion potentially cause?
High expressed emotion patterns have also found in the families of patients with other disorders such as depression and eating disorders.
So high EE may not only be a cause of schizophrenia rather of mental health breakdown in general.
What is dysfunctional thought processing?
Processing information differently to non-schizophrenics.
What does the cognitive explanation say how delusions and hallucinations are caused?
Schizophrenics cognitions may form the basis for their delusions and hallucinations.
What are schizophrenics delusions?
Delusions such as a paranoia involve distorted patterns of thinking which exaggerate how important the individual is to irrelevant events.
For example, if someone looks at as schizophrenic accidentally the schizophrenic may interpret it as having meaning: e.g. ‘I am being watched’.
This is referred to as ‘egocentric bias’.
Schizophrenics also fail to ‘reality test’ their beliefs i.e. they fail to assess whether a belief they hold is rational or irrational and fail to recognise their conditions as illogical and distorted.
How does the cognitive approach explain hallucinations?
It has been argued that the schizophrenic experience of hearing voices is simply an excessive focus on auditory stimuli and a high expectation that they will hear voices.
Thus, their exaggerated expectancy of hearing voices and their interpretation of random auditory stimuli as possessing meaning produce auditory hallucinations.
