Psychological explanations for schizophrenia

We've now finished our look at the psychological explations for schizophrenia. There are lots but we focused on the following, and you should make sure you have notes on these:

• The psychodynamic explanation
• The cognitive explanation - there are lots of these but we only looked at the attention-processing explanation. You only need one.
• Family dysfunction models - we looked at expressed emotion (EE) and double binds
• Labelling theory including a look at Rosenhan's study ('Being sane in insane places')

As the biological explanations for schizophrenia (particularly the dopamine hypothesis) are so strong, the diathesis-stress model is crucial in incorporating any psychological explanations. The adoption study by Tienari et al (1994) is a really nice study in demonstrating the mix of nature and nurture involved in 'causing' schizophrenia. This is found in the middle of this big ppt containing all the above explanations. s.