Psychological explanations for schizophrenia -A-Level Psychology

Psychological explanations:

Family dysfunction:

Psychologists have attempted to link schizophrenia to childhood and adult experiences of living in a dysfunctional family.

The schizophrenogenic mother-Fromm-Reichmann proposed a psychodynamic explanation based on patient information on their childhoods.She noted that many of her patients spoke of a schizophrenogenic mother who is cold,rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy.This leads to distrust ,paranoid delusions and ultimately schizophrenia.

Double-bind theory-Bateson et al emphasised the role of communication style within a family in the development of schizophrenia.The developing child finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear they are doing the wrong thing,but receive mixed messages about what this it and feel unable to seek clarification.When they get it wrong they are punished with the withdrawal of love .This makes them see the world as dangerous and confusing which is reflected in  symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.Bateson concluded that it was a risk factor.

Expressed emotion and schizophrenia-expressed emotion is the level of emotion (negative emotion) expressed towards a patient by their carers.

EE contains several elements:

-verbal criticism of the patient,violence.

-hostility towards the patient,anger and rejection.

-emotional over-involvement in the life of a patient,needless self-sacrifice.

These high levels of expressed emotions in carers directed towards patients are a serious source of stress for the patient and can explain relapses in patients with schizophrenia.However,the source of stress may trigger the onset of schizophrenia in a person who is already vulnerable e.g due to their genetic makeup.

Cognitive explanations:

-focuses on the role of mental processes.

-schizophrenia is associated with several types of abnormal information processing which may provide possible explanations for schizophrenia as a whole.

-schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing which is seen in the symptoms e.g the reduced processing of the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms.

-the lower than usual level of information processing suggests that cognition is likely to be impaired

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

–Metarepresentation is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour and allows us insight into our own intentions and goals and interpretation of the actions of others.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 of voices and delusions like thought insertion.

–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 central control and speech triggered by other thoughts.E.g sufferers of schizophrenia experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and the patient cannot suppress automatic responses to these.

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Evaluation:

Weak evidence for family-based explanations-there is almost no evidence to support the importance of the schizophrenogenic mother or double blind.Both these theories are based on the clinical observation of patients.These explanations have led historically to parent-blaming.Parents undergo further trauma for being blames.The shift in the 1980s from hospital to community care,often involving parent care,may be one of the factors leading to the decline of the schizophrenogenic mother and double bind theories.

Strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing-Stirling et al (2006) compared 30 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia with 18 no-patient controls on a range of cognitive tasks such as the stroop test,in which participants have to name the ink colours of colour words,suppressing the impulse to read the words in order to do this task.Patients took over twice as long to name the ink colours as the control group.