⭐️ psychological explanations of SZ✅

Question 1

what are the 2 types? briefly outline what they are

Answer 1

1 - family dysfunction …. any forms of abnormal processes within a family such as conflict, communication problems, cold parenting, criticism, control and high levels of expressed emotions.

2- cognitive explanations … role of mental processes, abnormal info processing as cognition is impaired

Question 2

1️⃣FAMILY DYSFUNCTION:

what is it?

what is the schizophreogenic mother? (SZG)

what does this lead to?

Answer 2

• any forms of abnormal processes within a family such as conflict, communication problems, cold parenting, criticism, control and high levels of expressed emotions.
• a mom doesn’t have sz but she’s cold and rejecting which causes sz
• paranoia and distrust which leads to delusions

Question 3

1️⃣FAMILY DYSFUNCTION:

what is the double bind theory? (Childs fear)

how do children often get punished when they do something wrong?

what happens to the child then

Answer 3

the idea that a child fears doing the wrong thing but receives mixed messages from parents about it so they feel confused and unable to comment on the situation / unfairness

• via a withdrawel of love
• they’re confused leading to disorganised thinking and paranoia … maybe sz

Question 4

1️⃣FAMILY DYSFUNCTION:

what is expressed emotion? (ee)

what does EE consist of?

what does high levels of EE do to the patient?

what is stress seen as?

Answer 4

• the level of emotion expressed towards a patent (sz) and carer (family member who looks after them)
• verbal criticism, violence, hostility and anger
• causes stress and maybe even a relapse
• a trigger for sz if your vulnerable due to genetic makeup

Question 5

2️⃣ COGNITIVE EXPLANATION:

what is it?

Answer 5

• the role of mental processes, abnormal info processing bc cognition is impaired

Question 6

2️⃣ COGNITIVE EXPLANATION:

who identified the two types of dysfunctional thought processing? briefly explain

Answer 6

• FRITH
• metarepresentation = when you reflect on thoughts and behav. we cant recognise our own thoughts and actions we presume they’re carried out by someone else … explains hallucinations and delusions
• central control = suppress automatic responses, perform deliberate actions, leads to disorganised speech since they cant express automatic thoughts triggered by other thoughts

Question 7

ao3

✅ 2 strengths

❌ 1 weakness

Answer 7

✅ it takes on board the nurture approach to the development of schizophrenia. For example, it suggests that schizophrenic behavior is the cause of environmental factors such as cognitive factors.

❌ family rships appraoch is that there is a problem of cause and effect. Mischler & Waxler found differences in the way mothers spoke to their schizophrenic daughters compared to their normal daughters, which suggests that dysfunctional communication may be a result of living with the schizophrenic rather than the cause of the disorder. This suggests that there is a problem of the chicken and egg scenario in relation to expressed emotion causing sz

✅ for dysfunctional info processing. Stirling compared 30 patients with a diagnosis of Sz with 18 non-patients controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop test, in which patients have to name the ink colours of the coloured words, suppressing the impulse to read the words in order to do this task. Patients took over twice as long to name the ink colours as the control group. Although there is a mass of evidence like this to show that information processing is different in the mind of sz suffers, there is a problem with cognitive explanations. Links between symptoms and faulty cognitions are clear; however, this does not tell us everything about the origins of those cognitions or of sz