Psychology - Paper 3 - Schizophrenia - Psychological explanations of SZ

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What are the 2 psychological explanations?
1) family dysfunction 2) cognitive explanations
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What does dysfunctional mean?
Not operating properly
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How is SZ linked with family dysfunction?
SZ is due to family experiences of conflict, communication problems, criticism and control.
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What are the 2 topics in family dysfunction?
High expressed emotion and double-bind situations.
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What's the description of expressed emotion?
High levels of negative expressed emotion include: verbal criticism, hostility and emotional over-involvement. Puts the person under stress therefore triggering SZ.
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What characteristics of SZ may high expressed emotion lead to?
Social withdrawal (to avoid conflict) and thought insertion (from over-involvement).
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What's the description/evidence for double bind situations?
Bateson investigated family communication styles. Risk factor for developing SZ was being caught in double bind situations as there was 'no win' situations.
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What characteristics of SZ can be seen when people are exposed to double bind situations?
Paranoid delusions (stems from the belief that the world is dangerous and people are trying to hurt them) and disorganised thinking (results from seeing the world as confusing and hard to make sense of).
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What is the supporting evidence for double bind situations?
Berger who found that schizophrenics reported a higher recall of double bind statements by their mothers than a control group.
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What's the contradictory evidence of double bind situations?
Berger's evidence involved people being retrospective therefore there's less confidence in the accuracy of recall of people with SZ because of their condition.
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What's another piece of contradictory evidence for double bind?
Hall and Levin analysed data from previous case studies and found no difference between families with and without a schizophrenic family member in the number of double binds observed.
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Why may it be a problem that most evidence comes from clinical case studies?
Because families may change their behaviour if they're being observed and case studies are unique and cannot be generalised to the wider population.
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What is the 1/2 supporting evidence for expressed emotion?
Marcus - prospective longitudinal study of high risk kids who had parent with SZ. Found kids who developed SZ were likely to come from families with negative relationships. However, among the high risk group, good parenting prevented SZ.
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What is the 2/2 supporting evidence for expressed emotion?
Kavanagh found that the mean relapse rate for SZ patients who returned to live with high EE families was 48% compared to 21% for those that went to live with low EE families. Further evidence that EE is a trigger factor for SZ.
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What are the practical applications?
Develop of family intervention programmes aimed at reducing levels of EE / helping families to avoid double binds may be helpful for people with SZ.
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What are the relevant issues and debates that link to the psychological explanations of SZ?
Nature vs. nurture - Family dysfunction is on the nurture side of the nature nurture debate. This means it ignores nature. Particularly a problem as genetic factors are important in SZ Difficult to disentangle the role of family environment/genetics.
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What's another explanation for SZ other than the psychological exolanation?
Interactionist approach - probably caused by an interaction between biological, psychological and environmental factors. Diathesis stress model links genetic predisposition to SZ with life events.
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What do the cognitive explanations focus on?
Impaired information processing. Frith et al identified 2 types of dysfunctional thought processe that underlie some of the symptoms of SZ (deficits in metarepresentation and deficits in central control).
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What is metarepresentation?
The ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour.
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How would deficits in metarepresentation affect a person?
Would disrupt a person's ability to distinguish whether their thoughts originate from within themselves or from their external environment.
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What is central control?
The ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead.
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What is the supporting evidence for central control?
Shen - compared 86 ppl with SZ and 86 without. 13 computerised tests e.g. stroop test. Found ppl with SZ performed worse on tasks that required sustained focus and attention.
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What is the contradictory evidence for central control and metarepresentation?
McKenna - found that schizophrenics do not seem to be any easier to distract than normal ppl when engaged on cognitive tasks. This challenges the idea that SZ is the result of cognitive deficits.
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What's a general evaluation point for central control and metarepresentation?
Cognitive explanations have evidence to support the existence of dysfunctional thought processes but they do not tell us anything about origins of those dysfunctional cognitions. So these explanations can account for symptoms but not origins.
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What are the other explanations?
Genetic and neural factors can also be used as evaluation or the interactionist approach.
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What are the practical applications?
CBT or family therapy
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Which issue/debate is relevant to the psychological explanation of SZ?
Determinism
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Card 2

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What does dysfunctional mean?

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Not operating properly

Card 3

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How is SZ linked with family dysfunction?

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Card 4

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What are the 2 topics in family dysfunction?

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Card 5

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What's the description of expressed emotion?

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