SZ - Psych Explanations Flashcards
(11 cards)
What is the family dysfunction explanation of schizophrenia?
It suggests schizophrenia is caused by dysfunctional family relationships and communication, which create stress and confusion that may trigger symptoms.
What is the schizophrenogenic mother theory?
Fromm-Reichmann proposed that a cold, controlling, rejecting mother and a passive father create an environment of tension and secrecy, leading to paranoid delusions and psychotic thinking.
What is the double bind theory?
Bateson et al. (1972) suggested that children receive contradictory messages (e.g. told to be independent but punished when they are), leading to confusion, disorganised thinking, and paranoia.
What is expressed emotion (EE)?
High EE refers to critical, hostile, or emotionally over-involved communication within families. It increases stress and is linked to higher relapse rates in people with schizophrenia.
What is the cognitive explanation of schizophrenia?
It proposes that schizophrenia results from faulty information processing, including a dysfunctional attention system and cognitive deficits in key areas like memory and inhibition.
What is Frith’s cognitive theory of schizophrenia?
Frith (1979) suggested problems with central control, meta-representation, and attention filtering cause symptoms like hallucinations, delusions of control, and speech derailment.
What research links expressed emotion to relapse in schizophrenia?
Research shows that expressed emotion (EE) is linked to relapse in schizophrenia.
Butzlaff & Hooley (1998) found that patients returning to high-EE families were significantly more likely to relapse.
How does Tienari et al. (2004) support the role of family dysfunction in schizophrenia?
Adoption studies indicate that family dysfunction significantly increases the risk of developing schizophrenia.
Tienari et al. found that 5.8% of children with a genetic risk adopted into healthy families developed schizophrenia, compared to 36.8% adopted into dysfunctional families.
What biological evidence supports cognitive explanations of schizophrenia?
Cognitive explanations are supported by neuroscience research showing brain activity differences.
Frith (1992) found reduced frontal lobe activity in patients with negative symptoms and abnormal activation in areas linked to delusions.
What experimental support exists for cognitive deficits in schizophrenia?
Cognitive processing deficits have been demonstrated in controlled experiments.
Stirling et al. (2006) found that patients with schizophrenia took twice as long as controls to name ink colours in the Stroop test.
What are the limitations of psychological explanations for schizophrenia?
A limitation is the difficulty in determining causality and the social sensitivity of some explanations.
Blaming schizophrenia on poor parenting can place emotional burden on families, and family dysfunction may be a result rather than a cause of schizophrenia.
