psychological explanations for SZ Flashcards
What are the two main psychological explanations for SZ?
Family dysfunction
Cognitive explanations
Family dysfunction
This theory links SZ to childhood and adult experiences of living in a dysfunctional family.
There are 3 explanations within Family dysfunction
schizophrenogenic mother
double bind theory
expressed emotion
The schizophrenogenic mother
a psycho dynamic explanation for SZ based on childhood accounts from patients. The schizophrenogenic mother is the cause of SZ: her characteristics are cold, rejecting and controlling as well as crating secrecy and tension in the family. The child develops a lack of trust in relationships and has paranoid delusions later in life and developing SZ. The father usually passive in child upbringing in these families.
Double bind theory
This focuses on family communication style, this is if the child finds themselves in a situation in which they fear doing the wrong thing but receive mixed messaging about what that is. This leads to the child being unable to seek clarification or comment about the unfairness of the situation. When the child inevitably gets something wrong the child is punished by a withdrawal of love. This leads the child to be confused about the world and see it as a dangerous place. This can lead to SZ symptoms such as paranoid delusions, family communication is a risk factor of SZ but not the only cause.
Expressed emotion
Expressed emotion looks at the level of emotion, particularly negative emotions, by the carers of the patients to the patient. It has several parts:
Verbal criticism of the patient, often alongside violence
Hostility to the patient, including anger and rejection
Emotional over involvement in the life of the patient, including self sacrifice
High levels of EE by the carers of the patient creates a source of stress possibly causing a relapse of SZ or a cause of SZ. This is especially likely if they are already vulnerable to the disorder (genetic etc).
strengths of family dysfunction
- ) An adoption study found that children adopted by people with SZ are less likely to develop SZ than those who have biological SZ parents but only when the family was rated as disturbed or dysfunctional. This supports the idea that upbringing is a factor for SZ.
- ) A study also found that 69% of adult women diagnosed with SZ has a history of physical abuse and/or sexual abuse during childhood. For men this was 59%.
- ) A study found that SZ patients reported a higher amount of double bind statements from their mother than non SZ patients. However their recall may be effected by SZ reducing the reliability of the study.
weaknesses of family dysfunction
- ) The evidence supporting the explanation is not very strong, for the double bind theory a study found that there was no difference between normal families and families with a SZ child in terms of patterns of parental communication.
- ) Not all patients who live in high EE families relapse, and not all patients in low EE families avoid relapse. a study found that 1/4 of patients show no psychological response to stressful comments from relatives. This shows that the Evidence for EE is very mixed.
- ) The explanation has led to parent blaming which hurts parents which are already suffering and can lead to trauma.
cognitive explanation for SZ.
these explanations focus on the role of mental processes, SZ is associated with several types of dysfunction thought processes and thus provide explanation for SZ as a whole.
Metarepresentation
This the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behavior which gives us insight into our own goals and intentions while looking at those of others.
Dysfunctional metarepresentation disrupts this ability and makes it hard to differentiate our actions and thoughts and others leading hallucinations, delusions etc.
Central control
This is the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we preform actions instead, disorganised speech and thought could result from the inability to ignore your own automatic thoughts as well as what others are saying. Suffers with SZ often experience derailment of their thoughts and what they say because there is too much going on in their thought processes leading to them losing control of their thoughts.
Strengths of cognitive explanations of SZ
-) There is a study that looked at 30 SZ patients and 30 non patients in a range of cognitive tasks such as the one where the word is a colour and says a colour. Patients with SZ took twice as long to complete the task which shows dysfunctional thought processes.
Weaknesses of cognitive explanations of SZ
- ) You can’t establish cause and effect, dysfunctional thought could be caused or causes SZ.
- ) The cognitive explanation fails to take into account biological factors such as dopamine in the brain. This means that it is reductionist as it is simplifying SZ to very basic elements and not considering other factors.
