Schizophrenia Flashcards
1
Q
- Define family dysfunction:
A
- 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
- psychologists have attempted to link schizophrenia to childhood and adult experiences of living in a dysfunctional family
2
Q
- The schizophrenigenic mother:
A
- Frieda Fromm-Reichmann proposed psychodynamic explanation for schizophrenia based on accounts she heard from her patients about their childhoods
- she noted that many of her patients spoke of a particular type of parent - schizophrenogenic mother
- she is said to be cold, rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy
- This leads to distrust later developing into paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia
3
Q
- What is the double bind theory?
A
- Gregory Bateson emphasised the role of communication style within a family
- Developing child regularly finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing, but receive mixed messages about what this is and feel unable to comment on unfairness of situation or seek clarification
- when the ‘get it wrong’ child is often punished with withdrawal of love
- This leaves them with an understanding of the world as confusing and dangerous- reflected in symptoms such as disorganised thinking , paranoid delusions
4
Q
- Expressed emotion adh schizophrenia:
A
- Expressed emotion = level of emotion, in particular negative emotion, expressed towards a patient by their carers
1. elements of EE: - Verbal criticism of patient, occasionally accompanied by violence
- Hostility towards patient, including anger and rejection
- Emotional over-involvement in patient’s life, including needless self-sacrifice
- ks
- High levels of expressed emotion in careers directed towards patient = serious source of stress for patient
- This is primarily an explanation for relapse in patients with schizophrenia
- It’s also been suggested that it may be a source of stress that can trigger onset of schizophrenia in an already vulnerable person e.g. due to their genetic make up
5
Q
- What are cognitive explanations?
A
- Explanations that focus in mental processes such as thinking, language and attention
6
Q
- What is schizophrenia associated with in cognitive explanations?
A
- Associated with several types of abnormal info processing
- Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing
7
Q
- Negative symptoms of schizophrenia - cognitive explanations:
A
- Reduced processing in ventral striatum = associated with negative symptoms
- reduced info processing in temporal and cingulate gyri are associate with hallucinations
- this lower than usual level of info processing suggests that cognition is likely to be impaired
8
Q
- Define dysfunctional thought processing:
A
- A general term meaning info processing that’s not functioning normally and produces undesirable consequences
9
Q
- What are the 2 types of dysfunctional thought processing Christoper Frith identified?
A
- Meta representation
- central control
10
Q
- What is meta representation?
A
- Cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours
- This allows us insight into our own intentions and goals
- also allows us to interpret action 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 like thought insertion
11
Q
- What is central control?
A
- The cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we performed deliberate actions instead
- Disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
- e.g. sufferers with schizophrenia tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and patient can’t suppress automatic responses to this
12
Q
- Evaluation - psychological explanations for schizophrenia:
A
- Support for family dysfunction as a risk factor
- weak evidence for family based explanations
- strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing
- evidence for biological factors isn’t adequately considered
13
Q
- Define positive symptoms of Schizophrenia:
A
- Atypical symptoms experienced in addition to normal experiences
- include hallucinations and delusions
14
Q
- What are hallucinations?
A
- Unusual sensory experiences - any sense
- some are related to events in environment e.g. voices heard either talking to or commenting on sufferer, often criticising them
- E.g. sufferer may see distorted facial expressions or occasionally people or animals that aren’t there
15
Q
- What are delusions?
A
- Aka paranoia
- delusions are irrational beliefs
- involve being historical, political or religious figure such as Jesus or Napoleon
- commonly involve being persecuted, perhaps by government or aliens or of having superpowers
- another class of delusions concerns the body- sufferers may believe that they or a part of them is under external control
- delusions can make sufferer behave in ways that make sense to them but seem bizarre to others
- can lead to aggression
