Psychological explanations for schizophrenia: cognitive explanation

Question 1

Outline

Answer 1

Suggests schizophrenia has a biological basis that disrupts thinking. E.g. abnormal activity in the prefrontal cortex have been linked to dysfunctional thinking. Frith et al focused of two types of dysfunction thinking:

Question 2

Metarepresentation

Answer 2

this relates to our ability to reflect on our own and other people’s behaviour. Disruption in this area could lead to us not being able to recognise whether our behaviour had been carried out by ourselves or someone else. - this can explain insertion (we believe thoughts are being projected into our mind from other people)

Question 3

Central control

Answer 3

relates to our ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform other actions. i.e focus our mind on one task without being distracted by other thoughts. - could explain disorganised speech (very difficult to think and speak clearly)

Question 4

Evaluation strength: Myer-Linderberg

Answer 4

found reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex when doing a task involving working memory. This supports the fact that schizophrenics have the abnormal brain functioning that produces the disordered thinking.

Question 5

Evaluation strength: Stirling et al (2006)

Answer 5

found that schizophrenics performed poorly on the Stroop test in comparison to a control group and ended up taking over twice as long to correctly identify the ink colour of a list of colour words. (links to central control)

Question 6

Evaluation weakness: Causation issues

Answer 6

Dysfunctional cognition could be a symptom rather than a cause of schizophrenia. (could be other factors)