Topic Summaries

Biological explanations for schizophrenia

A-Level > Psychology > AQA > A-Level Psychology Topic Summaries > Schizophrenia > Biological explanations for schizophrenia
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Addiction

  • 👥 Gottesman (1991) discovered a positive correlation between increasing genetic similarity of family members and their increased risk of developing schizophrenia.
    • He used family and twin studies to measure concordance rates: monozygotic twins – 48%, dizygotic twins – 17%, siblings – 9%, and parents 6%.
    • These results show a strong argument for the existence of candidate genes for schizophrenia.However, there is no 100% concordance rate, which shows that there is still an environmental influence for the development of schizophrenia.
  • 👥 Ripke (2014) discovered that schizophrenia is a polygenic disorder (has multiple candidate genes which contribute to its development.) He used a broad sample of 5,000 cases of Swedish people with schizophrenia to establish this.
  • The dopamine hypothesis: originally studies argued that hyperdopaminergia (too much dopamine) was responsible for schizophrenia, whereas it’s now widely accepted that hypodopaminergia (not enough dopamine) is more likely to be responsible. The dopamine hypothesis has high practical applications for drug therapy like antipsychotics.
  • Neural correlates: specific patterns of neural patterns coincide with specific psychological symptoms so it’s assumed that they contribute towards the symptoms.

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