Psychological explanations for schizophrenia

Question 1

Family dysfunction

Answer 1

abnormal processes within the 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 sz.

Question 2

the schizophrenogenic mother

Answer 2

according to Fromm-Reichmann the schizophrenogenic mother is cold rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy. This leads to distrust that later develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately sz.

Question 3

double bind theory

Answer 3

batseson et al agreed that the family climate is important in the development of sz but emphasised the role of communication style within a family. The 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 the unfairness of the situation or seek clarification. When they ‘get it wrong’ the child is punished by withdrawl of love. This leaves them with an understanding of the world as dangerous and confusing and thisis reflected in symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.

Question 4

expressed emotion

Answer 4

is the level of emotion typically neg expressed towards a person with sz. This includes verbal criticism of the person, hostility towards the person and emotional over-involvement in the life of the person.

Question 5

Cognitive explanations

Answer 5

Focuses on the role of mental processes.Sz is characterised by distruption to normal thought processing. Reduced processing in the ventral stratium is associated with negative symptoms, whilst reduced processing of info in the temporal and cingulate gyri are associated with hallucinations. This lower than usual level of info processing suggests that cognition is likely to be impaired

Question 6

Frith et al. identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms

Answer 6

Metarepresentation is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. 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 and delusions.

Central control is the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. Disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts