Psychological explanations Flashcards
(19 cards)
What is family dysfunction?
Process within a family such as poor family communications, cold parenting and high levels of expressed emotion
May be risk factors for both development and maintenance of schizophrenia
What does Fromm-Reichman propose?
Psychodynamic explanation
Schizophrenogenic mother
What is the schizophrenogenic mother?
Notes many of her patients spoke of particular type of parent
‘schizophrenia-causing’
Cold, rejecting and controlling, tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy
Leads to distrust that develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia
What does Bateson et al argue?
Double bind theory
Family climate is importance tin development of schizophrenia
Emphasis on role of communication style within a family
What is the double bind theory?
Developing child regularly finds themselves trapped in situations where fear doing the wrong thing
Receive mixed messages about what this is
Feel unable to comment of unfairness of this situations or seek clarification
When get it wrong child is punished by withdrawal of love
Leaving them with understanding of the world as confusing and dangerous
How is the double bind theory reflected?
Symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions
Just a risk factor - not a main problem
What is expressed emotion?
Level of emotion, in particular negative, expressed towards person with schizophrenia by their carers
What are the elements of expressed emotion?
Verbal criticism of person, occasionally accompanied by violence
Hostility towards person, including anger and rejection
Emotional over involvement in the life of the person, including needless self-sacrafice
What does expressed emotion lead to?
High levels of expressed emotion - serious source of stress
Primary explanation for relapse in people with schizophrenia
May be source of stress that can trigger onset of schizophrenia in a person who is already vulnerable
Eg. due to genetic makeup - diathesis stress model
What is a strength of family dysfunction?
Indicators of family dysfunction
Insecure attachment
Exposure to childhood trauma especially abuse
Read et al
Adults with schiz are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment, type C or D
69% of women and 59% men with schizophrenia have history of physical or sexual abuse
Morkved et al
Most adults reported at least one childhood trauma, mostly abuse
Strongly suggesting family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to schizophrenia
What is a limitation of family explanations?
Evidence lacks support
None to support importance of family based theories like schixophrenogenic mother and double bind
Both based on clinical observation and informal assessment of their mothers personalities
Not systematic evidence
Family explanations not been able to account for link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia
What is a cognitive explanation?
Any phenomenon is one which focuses on the role of mental processes
What is dysfunctional thought processing?
Information processing that does not represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences
How can we see dysfunctional thinking?
Disruption to normal thought processing
Reduced thought processing in ventral striatum - negative symptoms
Reduced processing of the information in the temporal and cingulate gyri - hallucinations
Lower than usual level of information processing suggests that cognition is likely to be impaired
Who spoke about metarepresentation dysfunction and central control dysfunction?
Frith et al
What is metarepresentation dysfunction?
Cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour
Allows us insight into our own intentions and goals
Allows us to interpret actions of others
Distrupts our ability to recognise out own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else
Explaining hallucinations of hearing voices and delusions like thought insertion
What is central control dysfunction?
Issues with cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions
Speech poverty and thought disorder - Result from inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
Eg. people with schizophrenia tend to experience derailment of thoughts because each word triggers associations and person cannot suppress automatic responses to these
What is a strength of dysfunctional thought processing?
Evidence
Stirling et al
Compared performance on range of cognitive tasks
30 people with schiz
30 control group
Tasks - stroop task, name the font colours of colour words
So have to suppress he tendency to rad the words out loud
People with schizophrenia took longer (over 2x as long as average) to name font colours as predicted by Frith et al
Cognitive process of people with schiz is impaired
What is a limitation of cognitive explanations?
only proximal origins of symptoms
Explain what is happening now to produce symptoms - distinct from distal explanations which focus on what initially caused the condition
Distal explanations - genetic and family dysfunctions
What is currently unclear and not well addressed is how genetic variation or childhood trauma might lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control
Meaning cognitive theories on their own only provide partial explanations for schizophrenia
