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Schizophrenia

Biological explanations: Dopamine hypothesis and Enlarged ventricles

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Recall questions on Dopamine hypothesis and Enlarged ventricles.

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Key term

What is the glutamate alternative to the dopamine hypothesis?

Key term

What evidence from antipsychotic drugs supports the dopamine hypothesis?

Key term

What evidence from stimulant drugs supports the dopamine hypothesis?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    State the original dopamine hypothesis.

    Model answer

    That the symptoms of schizophrenia arise from excessive dopamine activity in the brain, particularly overstimulation of D2 receptors in subcortical pathways.

  2. 2

    What evidence from antipsychotic drugs supports the dopamine hypothesis?

    Model answer

    Drugs that reduce positive symptoms block D2 receptors, and the clinical dose required tends to track how strongly a drug binds to those receptors.

  3. 3

    What evidence from stimulant drugs supports it?

    Model answer

    Amphetamine and other drugs that raise dopamine release can produce hallucinations and paranoid delusions resembling positive symptoms in people without the diagnosis.

  4. 4

    How did Davis and colleagues (1991) revise the hypothesis?

    Model answer

    They proposed excessive dopamine activity in mesolimbic pathways producing positive symptoms, combined with insufficient dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex producing negative and cognitive symptoms.

  5. 5

    What did Howes and Kapur (2009) argue in their third version of the hypothesis?

    Model answer

    That the key abnormality is increased presynaptic dopamine synthesis in the striatum, and that dopamine dysregulation is the final common pathway through which many different risk factors act.

  6. 6

    Explain aberrant salience.

    Model answer

    Kapur's (2003) proposal that excess dopamine makes unimportant stimuli feel significant, so ordinary events seem personally meaningful and the person constructs delusional explanations for them.

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