biological explanation - the neural correlates explanation of schizophrenia

Question 1

how can genes cause abnormalities in the brain?

Answer 1

genes influence our behaviour by controlling processes in our brain. so genes may cause abnormalities in the brain which can cause schizophrenia

Question 2

what are the 2 main hypotheses for which brain abnormalities cause schizophrenia?

Answer 2

1) neural correlates
2) dopamine hypothesis

Question 3

what does the neural correlates explanation of schizophrenia say?

Answer 3

the disorder is caused by abnormal brain structure. for instance, people with schizophrenia have larger ventricles and a smaller frontal cortex.

Question 4

support for the neural correlates explanation - study torrey (2002)

Answer 4

• mri scans provide an image of the structure of an individual’s brain
• in 2002, torrey conducted mri scans to look at the brains of people with schizophrenia. he compared their brains to a healthy control group who didn’t have schizophrenia.
• torrey found the participants with schizophrenia had larger ventricles than the control participants and their ventricles were 15% larger.
• this supports the idea that people with schizophrenia have enlarged ventricles

Question 5

limitation of neural correlates hypothesis - not enough sufficient evidence

Answer 5

• we don’t have sufficient evidence to conclude that brain abnormalities cause schizophrenia because the evidence obtained from mri studies are correlational.
• the drug medication that patients take to treat schizophrenia may act as a confounding variable in studies of neural correlates. for instance, the enlarged ventricles might be a side effect of taking medical drugs to treat schizophrenia.

Question 6

limitation of neural correlates - ignores individual differences

Answer 6

• there are studies that have reported different structural abnormalities in the brains of people with schizophrenia such as a difference in brain shape or a reduction in the number of neurons. so, there are individual differences in the brain abnormalities displayed across patients with schizophrenia.
• this is a problem for the neural correlates hypothesis as it suggests that abnormal brain structure cant be the cause of schizophrenia in all patients otherwise all schizophrenics would have the same brain abnormalities.