Schizphrenia: Psycholgical Epxlanations Flashcards
(10 cards)
What is family dysfunction
- abnormal processes within a family such as poor families communicating, cold parenting etc
- may be risk factors for development and maintenance of schizophrenia
What is the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’
Fromm-reichmann - many of her clients spoke of a particular type of parent (schizophrenogenic mother)
- this parent is cold, rejecting and controlling and creates a family climate characterised by tension
- this leads to distrust, that later develops into paranoid delusions (and ultimately schizophrenia)
What is the double bind theory
- Bateson et al - agreed family climate is important in the development of schizophrenia but emphasised the role of communication style within a family as a risk factor
- developing child regularly finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear they’re doing the wrong thing but receive mixed messages
- when the child ‘gets it wrong’ they are punished by withdrawal of love
Outline expressed emotion and schizophrenia
-expressed emotion is the level of (negative) emotion, expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by their carers. Contains several elements:
- verbal criticism, hostility towards person, emotional over involvement in the life of the person
- these are all a serious source of stress for the patient + primarily an explanation for schizophrenia relapse
Outline the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia
- schizophrenia is associated with several types of abnormal information processing
- reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms
What did frith et al add to the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia
- identified 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms:
- metarepresentation - cognitive ability to effect on thoughts/ behaviour. Dysfunction would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else
- central control - cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we Perform deliberate actions instead. Disorganised speech could result from inability to suppress automatic thoughts
What are the three evaluation points for psychological explanations for schizophrenia
- support for family dysfunction as a risk factor
- weak evidence for family based explanations
- strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing
Outline ‘- support for family dysfunction as a risk factor’ as an evaluation point for the psychological explanations of schizophrenia
- evidence to suggest difficult family relationships in childhood are associated with risk of schizophrenia
- read et al - reviewed studies,found 69% of adult women with a diagnosis of schizophrenia had a history of physical/sexual abuse
- however - problem of validity - info about childhood experiences was gathered after the diagnosis of schizophrenia, which may have distorted patients recall
Outline ‘weak evidence for family based explanations ’ as an evaluation point for the psychological explanations of schizophrenia
- evidence to support principle that poor childhood experiences are also dictated with adult schizophrenia
- limited evidence for importance of the schizophrenogenic mother/double bind theory
- both theories are based on clinical observation + early evidence involved assessing mothers for ‘crazy making characteristics’ (unethical)
- also have historically led to ‘parent blaming ‘
Outline ‘strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing ’ as an evaluation point for the psychological explanations of schizophrenia
- strong support for the idea that information is processed differently in the mind of schizophrenic
- researches compared people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia to a control group on a range of cognitive tasks (including the stroop test - within which diagnosed patients took 2x as long to name the ink colours)
- although, cognitive theories can explain what causes current symptoms but not the origins of the condition
