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Summary: A Biological Explanation Of Schizophrenia

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Summary: A Biological Explanation Of Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that affects the persons emotions and distorts how a person perceives the world. The person suffering has confused thoughts and has difficulty telling reality from delusion.
It can be described by psychological explanations and biological explanations.

A biological explanation of schizophrenia is the dopamine hypothesis, amounts of low levels of dopamine in the brain causes a loss of balance and co-ordination, it has been found in people with ADHD and Parkinson's disease. Where as high levels of dopamine is linked to schizophrenia. The neurons containing dopamine are in the brain in a part called the substantia nigra, when we experience a happy event the dopamine gets released and fills the synapse and bind
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In family studies the likely hood of gaining schizophrenia due to a shared environment is higher than developing schizophrenia due to genes this because children learn from social learning theory and begin to imitate the behaviours that a schizophrenic person e.g her father have shown. The fact that she is also closely genetically related to the person with schizophrenia will also increase the chance of inheriting schizophrenia due to the fact that she could have similar wave patterns in the brain as her father with schizophrenia which would increase the …show more content…
If the person with schizophrenia has had a bad childhood from their parents such as them being uncaring then the child would be fixated into an early stage of development. This means that the ego hasn't formed properly and has no sense of reality. The hallucinations developed is the ego trying to distinguish reality into the individual. Case study 3 represents this explanation as Laura has extreme anxiety which has led to her having hallucinations about people being after her and the TV using her ideas. Another explanation is the behavioural theory which states that behaviour is learnt, this means that the individual who acts weird in society will be seen as weird and will be avoided however due to this they will get attention from it and the attention will act a reward to positively reinforce them. This will lead to the idea that they will do this behaviour more often and be labelled as schizophrenic.
There are so strengths that support this theory such tokens being used to encourage normal behaviour to treat it, this shows that the behaviour can be learnt and supports the theory that schizophrenia can be learnt through operant

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