528 Chapter
15
Psychological Disorders
ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA
Although biological factors provide important pieces of the puzzle of schizophrenia,
we still need to consider past and current experiences in the environments of people
who develop the disturbance. For instance, psychoanalytic approaches suggest that
schizophrenia is a form of regression to earlier experiences and stages of life. Freud
believed that people with schizophrenia lack egos that are strong enough to cope
with their unacceptable impulses. They regress to the oral stage—a time when the
id and ego are not yet separated. Therefore, individuals with schizophrenia essen-
tially lack an ego and act out impulses without concern for reality.
Although this reasoning is theoretically plausible, little evidence supports psy-
choanalytic explanations. Somewhat more convincing theories look toward the emo-
tional and communication patterns of the families of people with schizophrenia. For
instance, some researchers suggest that schizophrenia results from high levels of
expressed emotion.
Expressed emotion is an interaction style characterized by family
members’ criticism, hostility, and emotional intrusiveness. Other researchers suggest
that faulty communication patterns lie at the heart of schizophrenia (Miklowitz &
Thompson, 2003; Lobban, Barrowclough, & Jones, 2006).
Psychologists who take a cognitive perspective on schizophrenia suggest that the
problems in thinking that people with the disorder experience point to a cognitive
cause. Some suggest that schizophrenia results from
overattention to stimuli in the
environment. Rather than being able to screen out unimportant or inconsequential
stimuli and focus on the most important things in the environment, people with
schizophrenia may be excessively receptive to virtually everything in their environ-
ment. As a consequence, their information-processing capabilities become overloaded
and eventually break down. Other cognitive experts argue that schizophrenia results
from
underattention to certain stimuli. According to this explanation, people with
schizophrenia fail to focus suffi ciently on important stimuli and pay attention to
other, less important information in their surroundings (Cadenhead & Braff, 1995).
Although it is plausible that overattention and underattention are related to dif-
ferent forms of schizophrenia, these phenomena do not explain the origins of such
information-processing disorders. Consequently, cognitive approaches—like other
environmental explanations—do not provide a full explanation of the disorder.
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