OCR Psychology A Level Book 2 sample

check your understanding 1. Identify one cognitive principle and explain how it relates to mental illness. 2. Identify the three factors in Beck’s cognitive triad. 3. Outline what cognitive schemas are and how they develop. 4. Explain how Butler et al. ’s study supports the cognitive explanation of depression. 5. Summarise Frith’s cognitive explanation of schizophrenia. 6. Outline one piece of research that supports the cognitive explanation of schizophrenia. 7. Briefly outline how cognitive principles could explain specific phobias. Jumping spider under extreme magnification. Almost cute. A number of clinicians believe that if the cognitive deficits of schizophrenia can be explained, then the disorder we know as schizophrenia no longer needs to be explained. It can be understood just in terms of the individual deficits. Cognitive explanation of schizophrenia Many of the deficits seen in schizophrenia are cognitive, such as speech poverty, disorganised thought or speech and thought insertion (as described in the characteristics of the disorder on page 21). Therefore, it makes sense to look for a cognitive explanation. The main assumption of the cognitive explanation is that the symptoms of schizophrenia are caused by disordered thinking. For clinically healthy people, most thoughts, perceptions and other cognitive processes occur outside our conscious awareness. This means we are unaware of most of the cognitive processing that occurs, which makes the cognitive load we have to deal with more manageable. Chris Frith (1979) suggests that people with schizophrenia are more consciously aware of the many cognitive processes that usually take place out of awareness. This means that thoughts that would normally be filtered before reaching conscious awareness are no long filtered, increasing the processing that occurs consciously. The result is that too much information is being processed, leading to sensory overload. Frith refers to this as attention deficit theory . Later in this chapter (page 42) we will discuss the cognitive neuroscience explanation of schizophrenia, which considers the neurological basis of cognitive deficits. Research evidence Somaia Mohamed et al. (1999) compared 94 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who had just been admitted into a psychiatric ward in Iowa with 305 clinically and physically ‘normal’ people (a self- selected sample of the wider community). The researchers found deficits in the schizophrenia patients’ immediate and delayed recall, sequencing, organisation, cognitive flexibility, sustained attention, comprehension of language, social cognition, and Stroop test performance. This demonstrates a range of cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia. Sue Kaney et al. (1992) also found deficits in memory in participants with schizophrenia, finding that the 16 patients with schizophrenia recalled fewer propositions (pieces of information that contain some form of judgement or opinion) from a series of six short stories that they were learning as part of a test, compared with 16 participants who had depression, and 16 who had no mental health problems ( control group ). However, on closer examination Kaney found that the participants with schizophrenia recalled more propositions with threatening content than the control group. This suggests that patients with schizophrenia have biases in interpretation of information, a further indication of cognitive differences. Cognitive explanation of specific phobias Aaron Beck also proposed a cognitive model to explain the causes of specific phobias (Beck et al . 2005). Two key features of this model are the role of the individual’s beliefs and their appraisals of objects and situations. In other words, the fear response is caused not so much by the situation or object itself, but by the person’s interpretation of it. Phobic people demonstrate two forms of cognitive bias. 1. The first is an attentional bias . People who develop specific phobias are selectively focused on threat—they pay extreme attention to situations and objects that produce fear and anxiety. Not only are they attentive to a stimulus when it is present, they are also hypervigilant—that is, constantly scanning for the phobic stimulus before it is detected. 2. The second cognitive bias is a negative appraisal bias . People who develop specific phobias appraise (i.e. interpret) harmless situations and objects as dangerous—they exaggerate the extent of risk or danger. At the same time they underestimate their own ability to cope. These negative appraisals are the result of irrational beliefs and thoughts that are maladaptive. For example, overgeneralisation of the danger (‘There are spiders literally everywhere’), and catastrophising (‘I’m powerless to stop the fear’). Research evidence Tobias Pflugshaupt et al. ’s (2005) participants were 26 people with a spider phobia and 26 non-phobic controls . All participants were shown 16 pictures of everyday scenes into which one, two or three images of spiders had been placed. The participants’ task was to search each picture and detect as many spiders as they could. While they were doing this, an instrument tracked their eye movements across each scene very precisely. The researchers found that the participants with a spider phobia were quicker than non-phobics to detect the spiders. They also fixated their gaze significantly closer to the spiders once they had detected them. This is evidence of a systematic attentional bias in a common specific phobia, supporting a cognitive explanation of phobia. Research has also found a highly significant impairment in Theory of Mind amongst people with schizophrenia (Sprong et al . 2007), a concept familiar to you from Baron-Cohen et al.’ s core study. This Theory of Mind impairment suggests that some of the symptoms of schizophrenia relate to a lack of understanding of other people’s intentions and the patient monitoring their own intentions. 37 Background: The cognitive explanation of mental illness