Psychological Explanation

What are the 3 psychological explanations for schizophrenia?

1. Family dysfunction

2. Cognitive explanations

3. Diathesis stress framework

1. Family dysfunction

• Proposed as a social explanation, this theory suggests that dysfunctional family relationships contribute to the development of schizophrenia. Two key psychodynamic models include

• Schizophrenogenic mothers = An overly controlling and emotionally distant mother creates a family environment that fosters paranoia in the child

• Double bind theory (Bateson 1972) = When a child receives conflicting messages from a caregiver consistently (eg love paired with punishment), it leads to confusion in communication and thought patterns, potentially causing disorganised thinking or paranoia

2. Cognitive explanations

• Focus on faulty processing of feelings and experiences. Attention deficit theory (Firth 1979) says people with schizophrenia struggle to filter irrelevant stimuli, leading to sensory overload and contributing to hallucinations and delusions

• Cognitive theories view schizophrenia as resulting from distorted thinking such as metacognitive biases, externalising attribution styles and problems in distinguishing between internal and external self generated thoughts

3. Diathesis stress framework

• This integrative model combines both psychological vulnerability and environment stressors. Diathesis = A predisposition to schizophrenia (eg faulty cognitive systems or disturbed family dynamics). Stress = Trigger events such as trauma, drug use or high expressed emotion in families

• The model suggests schizophrenia develops when a vulnerable individual experiences significant stress, tying together cognitive and social factors

AO3 - Berger (1965)

Berger found that people with schizophrenia reported higher recall of double bind statements from their parents than non schizophrenic controls. This supports the idea that conflicting family communication may contribute to distorted thinking. However, recall may be retrospective and unreliable, especially in individuals with schizophrenia, lowering the studies validity

AO3 - Weak causal links in family based theories

Most research into family dysfunction is correlational, meaning we can’t tell whether poor family communication causes schizophrenia or is a result of it. Eg it may be that having a child with schizophrenia causes stress and breakdown in communication, not the other way round. This limits how confidently we can accept family dysfunction as a cause

AO3 - Real world applications

Psychological theories like expressed emotion have led to practical interventions like family therapy, which aims to reduce expressed emotion and improve communication. This helps reduce relapse rates in people with schizophrenia, giving the theory high ecological and treatment validity

AO3 - Incomplete explanation

Cognitive explanations explain symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, but not what causes them in the first place. They describe how people think in disordered ways, but not why those thinking patterns develop - limiting their explanatory power. This means they are often better used as part of a broader model, such as the diathesis stress model