Psychological explanations for SZ Flashcards
What are the two psychological explanations for SZ?
- family dysfunction
- cognitive explanations
What is family dysfunction?
- focuses on the idea that abnormal processes within the family such as poor communication, cold parenting & high levels of expressed emotion can be risk factors for the onset and/or maintenance of SZ
Who proposed the first theory of family dysfunction and what itype of explanation is it?
- Fromm-Reichmann > coined the term schizophrenogenic mother (1948)
- a psychodynamic explanation based on accounts from her patients who spoke about a particular type of parent
What is the schizophrenogenic mother?
- means schizophrenia causing
- schizophrenogenic mother displays confusing mix of personality traits
- e.g. mother is cold rejecting & controlling
- creates a family climate characterised by tension & secrecy > leading to distrust & later paranoid delusions > and SZ
Who proposed the second theory of family dysfunction and what is it?
- Bateson et al> double bind theory
- a communication style marked by contradictory or unclear messages from their parents
What does Bateson et al argue double binds lead to in children?
- child finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing (received mixed messages about what it is so cannot seek clarification)
- when they get it wrong= withdrawal of love
- have an understanding of world as dangerous & confusing > more likely to develop SZ
What symptoms does double binds result in?
- disorganised thinking
- paranoid delusions
What is the third theory of family dysfunction?
- expressed emotion (EE) which is the level of negative emotion expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by their carers (often family)
What elements does expression emotion contain?
- verbal criticism of the person, accompanied by violence
- hostility, anger, rejection
- emotional overinvolvement (needless self sacrifice , blame etc)
What does EE cause?
- serious source stress
- can trigger the onset of SZ in someone who is vulnerable (genes) or can lead to relapse
What is a strength of the the family dysfunction explanation?
- evidence linking family dysfunction to SZ
- indicators of FD include insecure attachment & exposure to childhood trauma, especially abuse
- Read > adults with SZ are disproportionately likley to have an insecure attachment particularly type C or D > also reported that 69% of women & 59% of men with SZ have a history of physical and/or sexual abuse
- Research by Morkved et al > most adults with SZ reported at least one childhood trauma (mostly abuse)
- strongly suggests family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to SZ
What is limitation of the family dysfunctional explanation?
- poor evidence for the explanations
- no support for the importance of traditional family based theories such as the schizophrenogenic mother & double bind
- both theories are based on clinical observations of patients & informal assessment of the personality of mothers of patients > no systematic evidence
- not been able to account for the link between childhood trauma & SZ
What is another limitation of FD as an explanation for schizophrenia?
-research linking FD to SZ is highly socially sensitive because it can lead to parent-blaming
- for parents already having to watch their child experience the symptoms of SZ & take responsibility for their care, to be blamed literally adds insult to injury
- despite this > psychologists should not shy away from investigating sensitive topics because with the correct precautions & considerations > benefits of such research outweigh the costs & will have real world app in attachment, childcare, parenting skills etc.
What does the cognitive explanation for SZ focus on?
- focuses on the role of mental processes such as thinking, language and attention
What is schizophrenia said to be associated with what type of thought processing?
- several types of dysfunctional thought processing (information processing that does not represent reality accurately & produces undesirable consequences)
How is dysfunctional thought processing shown in many SZ symptoms?
- Simon et al
- reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms
- reduce processing of information in the temporal & cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations
>low levels of information processing = cognition likely to be impaired
What are the two types of dysfunctional thought processes identified by Frith et al?
- metarepresentation dysfunction
- central control dysfunction
What is metarepresentation and what does it allow us to do?
- this the cognitive ability to reflect on thought and behaviour
> this allows us insight into our own intentions & goals
> & allows us to interpret the intentions of others
What does dysfunction in metarepresentation cause?
- disrupt your ability to recognize your own actions & thoughts as being carried out by yourself rather than someone else
- this explains auditory hallucinations & delusions like thought insertion (thinking you have thoughts being projected into the mind by others)
What is central control and what does its dysfunction cause?
- the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions
- dysfunction results in speech poverty & thought disorder due to inability to suppress automatic thoughts & speech triggered by other thoughts
- e.g. people with SZ tend to experience derailment of thoughts because each word triggers associations & person cannot suppress automatic response to these
What is a strength of the cognitive explanation?
- research to support dysfunctional thought processing
- Stirling et al> compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in people with SZ & a control group without SZ
- tasks included the Stroop task (naming font colours of colour words) which involves suppressing the tendency too read words out loud
- as predicted by Frith et al’s central control theory, people with SZ took longer, over 2x longer on average to name font colours
- means cognitive process of people with SZ are impaired > in line with theory
What is a limitation of the cognitive explanation?
- they can only explain proximal origins of symptoms
- cognitive exp for SZ are proximal exp because they only explain what is happening now to produce symptoms > this is distinct from distal exp which focus on what initially caused the condition e.g. SZ caused by low dopamine levels, caused by candidate genes >inherited genes (biological exp)
- Cognitive dysfunction has the potential of becoming a distal exp if we discover how genetic variation or childhood trauma might lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control > this is unclear & not well addressed
- means cognitive theories on there own only provide partial exp for SZ
