Psychological Explanations

Set of cards created by students for psychopathology unit in AQA A2

13 cards   |   Total Attempts: 182
  

Cards In This Set

Front Back
Psychodynamic:
Ans: Regression to a pre-ego stage and attempts to re-establish control (a lack of awareness of self)
Social / Cultural Explanations: Life events Brown and Birley (1968)

Ans: Higher risk of schizophrenia if really stressed. Brown and Birley- before schizophrenic episodes, those patients had reported twice as many stressful life events than patients without schizophrenic episodes.
Family Models Expressed emotion (Linszen etal 1997) Kalafi + Torabi (1996) How this links to diathesis stress model
Ans: Linzen- a patient returning to family with high levels of expressed emotion is 4 times more likely to relapse. Kalafi+Torabi- high levels of expressed emotion (e.g overprotective mothers and rejective fathers), were the main causes of schizophrenia. This links to the diahesis stress model because it's saying that by the parents acting in this way, it triggers the onset of schizophrenia.
Family Models: Double bind (Bateson 1956)
Ans: Children who often recieve contradictory messages from parents are more likely to develop schizophrenia.
Retrospective and Prospective studies on stressful events. Brown and Birley 1968 Hirsch et al 1996
Ans: Retrospective: Brown and Birley- (looking back, what could have called caused the onset) Prospective: Hirch et al- monitored 71 Sz patients over 48 week period. Found that stressful events accumilated to cause the episode.
Cognitive explanations: Frith's Model
Sz's cannot distinguish between actions drived by external forces and those driven by internal forces.
Cognitive explanations: Helmsley's model
He said that some psychotic symptoms arise from a disconnection between stored knowledge and sensory input.
Evaluation of Psychodynamic
No evidence to support it (AO3-its not falsifiable, Karl Popper) Parents of Sz patients do behave differently.
Evaluation of Life events
Van Os reported no link between life events and Sz. In a prospective part of the study he found that a stressful life event were less likely to make a patient relapse. Link between life events and Sz is only correlational, not showing its a definite cause, other factors may be involved. ("Chicken and Egg")
Evaluation of Double Bind
Sz's report higher recall of double bind statements from their mothers than non-Sz. However this evidence is not reliable.
Evaluation of Expressed Emotion
Issue of cause or effect ("Chicken+Egg") Therapies based on this theory significantly reduce relapse rates.
Evaluation of Cognitive models
A link has been found between excess dopamine and working memory. A drug has been created that creates hallucination to show Sz that they arent real.
A03 issue of ethics + labelling RD Laing Scheff (1966+1974)
Once a patient is labelled Sz this diagnosis continued to influence behaviour of staff towards patients. RD Laing said that Sz was a response to intolerable stresses in the famiy/society. Scheff's studies supported the theory.