psychological explanations of schz Flashcards
name the psych explanations of schz.
family dysfunction.
- schizophrenogenic mother
- double bind
- expressed emotion
cognitive explanation.
outline family dysfunction.
Abnormal processes 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.
describe the schizophrenogenic mother.
Fromm-Reichmann developed her theory by listening to accounts of her client’s childhoods.
According to from Reichmann the schizophrenic mother is one who creates schizophrenic children. These kinds of mothers are domineering, cold, rejecting, and guilt producing.
Fromm-Reichmann argued that, in conjunction to a passive ineffectual father, such mothers drove their children to schizophrenia creating a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy.
This creates distrust that later develops into paranoid delusion, and ultimately schizophrenia.
Describe the double bind theory.
Schizophrenia is a consequence of abnormal patterns in family communication - the patient is a symptom of a family wide problem.
In a double bind situation, a person has given mutually contradictory signals by another person. This places them an impossible situation causing internal conflict.
Schizophrenic symptoms represent an attempt to escape from double bind.
A father might for example, complain about the lack of affection shown by his daughter. This is called a primary communication. At the same time, the father might tell his daughter that she is too old to hug him when she tries to be affectionate.
This is called meta communication - meaning the child can’t win.
Describe the expressed emotion explanation.
More recent research has been concerned with the role of families and the maintenance of schizophrenia rather than its cause.
In some families family members are: frequently hostile toward each other, critical of each other, over involved and over concerned with each other’s lives. These families are said to be high in expressed emotion. Other families do not show these characteristics and are said to be low in expressed emotion.
these high levels of EE are a serious source of stress for the patient - according to researchers the extent of expressed emotion within a family is a strong predictor of relapse rates amongst discharged schizophrenics.
outline the cognitive explanation of schz.
Explanations that focus on mental processes such as thinking language and attention.
Schizophrenia is associated with several types of abnormal information processing and these can provide possible explanations.
Frith et al (1992) Identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms: metarepresentation and central control.
outline what is meant by metarepresentation.
metarepresentation is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour.
This allows us insight into our own intentions and goals. Allows us to interpret the actions of others.
Dysfunction in metarepresentation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else.
This would explain hallucinations of voices and delusions such as thought insertion.
Outline what is meant by central control.
Central control is the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead.
disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts.
for example, sufferers with schizophrenia tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations, and the pension cannot suppress automatic responses to these.
Discuss support for family dysfunction as a risk factor as a strength of family based explanations.
a strength of the family dysfunctional explanation is evidence of research support.
Evidence to suggest that difficult family relationships and childhood are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia and adulthood.
For example read et al. reviewed 46 studies of child abuse and schizophrenia and concluded the 69% of adult women in patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse or both in childhood. For men the figure was 59%. Adults with insecure attachments to their primary carer are also more likely to have schizophrenia (Berry et al).
There is therefore a large body of evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia, increasing the value of the explanation.
HOWEVER -
Most of this evidence share the weakness of coming from methodologically flawed studies. Information about childhood experiences was gathered retrospectively - after the development of the symptoms, and the schizophrenia may have distorted patients’ recall of childhood experiences.
This creates a serious issue with validity.
A much smaller amount of studies have been carried out prospectively. There is prospective evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia but not a huge amount of results have been inconsistent.
Therefore, the support this evidence can provide the explanation is very limited.
Discuss weak evidence for family based explanations as a limitation.
Although there is plenty of evidence supporting the broad principle that poor childhood experiences in the family are associated with adult schizophrenia, a limitation is that there is almost none to support the importance of the schizophrenic mother or double bind theory.
Both these theories are based on clinical observation of patients, and early evidence involved assessing the personality of the mother of patients for crazy making characteristics - an approach that would be be considered to be of much value now.
this greatly limits our confidence in the validity of the explanation.
ADDITIONALLY -
another problem with dysfunctional family explanations for schizophrenia is that the research into it is socially sensitive.
historically, it has led to patient blaming.
Parents who have already suffered at seeing their child’s descent into schizophrenia and who are likely to bear lifelong responsibility for their care, underwent further trauma by receiving the blame for the condition.
Therefore family dysfunction explanations for schizophrenia are highly socially sensitive, and not widely accepted as a theory in the modern day - thus limiting its current value as an explanation.
Discuss strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing as a strength of cognitive explanations.
A strength of the cognitive examinations is that there is strong support for the idea that information is processed differently in the mind of the schizophrenia sufferer.
Stirling et al (2006) compared 30 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia with 18 nonpatient controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop test, in which participants have to name the ink colours of colour words, suppressing the impulse to read the words in order to do this task.
In line with Friths theory of central control dysfunction, patients took over twice as long to name the ink colours as the control group.
this provides empirical evidence for the cognitive explanation of schz, increasing the explanations’ validity.
HOWEVER -
There is a problem with cognitive explanations for schizophrenia. Links between symptoms and faulty cognition are clear, however, this does not tell us anything about the origins of these cognitions or of schizophrenia. Cognitive theories can explain the proximal causes of schizophrenia, i.e. what causes current symptoms but not the distal causes, i.e. not the origins of the condition.
this reduces the value of the cognitive explanation of schz, as it is not a full explanation.
Discuss direction of causality as a limitation of the psychological explanations of schizophrenia.
a limitation of the psychological explanation is direction of causality.
While there is a mass of information concerning abnormal cognitions, there is also massive information about abnormal biology and schizophrenia.
However, it remains unclear what causes what - including whether cognitive factors are a cause or a result of the neural correlates and abnormal neurotransmitter levels seen in schizophrenia - as proposed by the biological explanation.
This suggests that the validity of both biological and psychological explanations for the original cause of schizophrenia is questionable.
Although there are definitely biological factors involved, they may result from psychological factors.
Similarly, although there are definitely psychological factors in schizophrenia, these may be the result of underlying biological causes.
Unless we can untangle cause and effect it will remain very hard to say whether biological and psychological explanations are correct.
