Romanian Orphan Studies

Privation is the failure to form an attachment. In this topic area we will be looking at the effects of privation by focusing on children who have been raised in institutions.

Rutter et al (2011) and the Romanian orphans ERA study (English & Romanian Adoptees)

Background: An awful time in Romanian history, provided an opportunity for psychologists to understand the effect of Institutionalisation. In 1966, the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion – and all other forms of contraception – in a bid to boost his country’s population. Many families could not afford to look after such a large family and so many ended up in orphanages. After the 1989 revolution, many of the children were adopted, and some of them to British families.

Aim: Rutter wanted to see if good care could compensate for the privation the children had suffered before the overthrow of a Communist dictator in Romania.

Method: This is an on-going longitudinal study which began in 1990’s.

Sample & Procedure: Around165 Romanian orphans were adopted into British families.  Physical, cognitive and emotional development has been assessed at ages 4, 6, 11 and 15 years. Information was also gathered through the use of interviews with adoptive parents and teachers. A group of 52 British children who were adopted around the same time were used as a control group.

Results: 

Physical development: When the Romanian orphans arrived in the UK, half of the children showed delayed intellectual development and most of them were seriously malnourished and underweight.

Intellectual development: At age 11, the mean average IQ was:

• 102 for those adopted before 6 months
• 86 for those adopted between 6 months and 2 years
• 77 for those adopted after 2 years

Essentially, the longer the children remained in institutions, led to more severe effects on the children’s intellectual development. Therefore, early intervention appears to be key in improving a child’s intellectual development.

Attachment and emotional development:

• At the age of 6, children who were adopted after they were 6 months old had a much higher level of disinhibited attachment e.g. attention seeking and clinginess. Children select attachment figures indiscriminately and behave in an overly familiar fashion with complete strangers.
• When the same children were assessed at 11 years old, around 50% still showed disinhibited attachment. This highlights the long term effects of institutionalisation, but also suggests that some children were able to recovery as they developed.
• There were also a small number of cases where the Romanian children were identified as having quasi-autism tendencies. This is where children would show problems in understanding the meaning of social contexts. None of the British children presented quasi-autism tendencies.

Conclusion: Children exposed to long periods of Institutionalisation are more to suffer long-term effects to their emotional and intellectual development. Children are more likely to make a full recovery if adopted into a caring environment at an earlier age.

Chugani et al. (2001) – Romanian children – Biology 

Aim & Sample: Administered PET scans to a sample of 10 children adopted from Romanian orphanages and compared them with 17 normal adults and a group of 7 children.

Results: Assessments showed mild neurocognitive impairment, impulsivity, and attention and social deficits. Specifically, the Romanian orphans showed significantly decreased activity in the orbital frontal gyrus, parts of the prefrontal cortex/hippocampus and amygdala, associated with decision making, memory and emotions. 

Conclusion: Chugani concluded that the dysfunction in these brain regions may have resulted from the stress of early deprivation and might be linked to the long-term cognitive and behavioural deficits.

Here are some videos to give you an idea of what the Romanian orphanages were like. This will give you some context to the Rutter study. Please be warned that these videos are disturbing and they may be upsetting to watch. 

The effects of institutionalisation

Affectionless Psychopathy:

This condition involves a lack of emotional development, characterised by a lack of concern for others, lack of guilt and inability to form meaningful and lasting relationships.

Disinhibited attachment:

A condition in which children select attachment figures indiscriminately and behave in an overly familiar fashion with complete strangers.  For example, an institutionalised child will be equally affectionate and friendly to someone they have known for ages, and to a complete stranger. It seems to be caused by long periods of institutional care in early life, particularly when there has been a high turnover of caregivers.  They often have other behavioural disorders too including attention seeking.

Mental retardation:

Impaired cognitive and intellectual development, for example adversely affecting their ability to learn.  In this case caused by prolonged periods in institutional care. Rutter’s Romanian orphans showed this initially, but those who had early intervention of necessary after-care, went on to make a full recovery.

Goldfarb (1947)

• Group 1: spent the first few months in an orphanage and were then fostered.
• Group 2: spent 3 years in an orphanage before being fostered, (i.e. had little opportunity to form attachments in early life).

Results: The children who had spent 3 years at the orphanage performed less well on IQ tests and were less social and more likely to be aggressive! 

Evaluation

Strengths:

• Practical applications: Studies like Rutter’s Romanian orphans have significantly improved our understanding of the dangers of institutional care and of steps that can be taken to mitigate against the worst effects. In the light of their research institutions now assign fewer caregivers to reach child and try to assign a specific key person to each child who takes overall responsibility and spends sufficient time with the child to allow attachments to develop. Langton (2006) Children’s homes and orphanages now ensure that each child is cared for by only 1 or 2 carers known as key workers.
• Longitudinal research: The research by both studies are carried out over time. This increases the validity of understanding the development of behaviour and how it affects the children over time. It is far more insightful than a snapshot study as the research is collecting data on the children many times over a period of time. 
• Extensive data collection: Data was collected via standardised tests and interviews with adoptive parents and teachers. This allowed Rutter to understand the effects of deprivation in great detail, providing several insights through the data collection. This helped to improve the validity of the results to ensure that an accurate understanding of the effects of institutionalisation was formed.
• Useful applications: The research has shown that privation is reversible, suggesting that Bowlby exaggerated his effects of maternal deprivation and that children can be saved from extreme privation.
• Validity: There were also a small number of cases where the Romanian children were identified as having quasi-autism tendencies. This is where children would show problems in understanding the meaning of social contexts. None of the British children presented quasi-autism tendencies. The benefit in having the control group is that the researchers could see whether their were certain effects which were unique to the Romanian orphans, or were the similarities in the effects of being institutionalised.
• Research to support: The effects of institutionalisation has been supported by a number of studies. For example the Rutter research, Goldfarb and Chugani. Chugani used PET scans which helps to provide an objective measure in the effects of institutionalisation.

Weaknesses:

• Generalisability: Although much useful data about institutionalisation has come out of Romanian orphan studies, it is possible that conditions were so bad that results cannot be applied to understanding the impact of better quality institutional care or indeed any situation where children experience deprivation. For example, Romanian orphanages had particularly poor standards of care, especially when it came to forming any relationship with the children, and extremely low levels of intellectual stimulation. This is a limitation of the Romanian orphan studies because the unusual situational variables mean the studies may lack generalisability. If the same strategies are applied to institutions with superior care, it may not have the same impact.

• Longitudinal research: It is still relatively early days for the Romanian orphans in Rutter’s study.  So far it appears that they are making excellent progress.  However, they will be studied for many more years as part of the on-going longitudinal study.  Only time will tell if there has been any longer term emotional effects. Furthermore, the attrition rates may be an issue with the research. If some of the children drop out later on in the study, this may provide an inaccurate picture of the long-term effects. For example, those who stay, may have better development, but those who had negative effects, may have left the study and so it could over estimate the positive recovery, or it could underestimate the negative long-term effects.
• Validity & Extraneous variables: This is also an issue in Rutter’s study. The children were not randomly assigned to conditions. The researchers played no part in the adoption process, it was the prospective adoption parents that chose the child. Those children who were adopted earlier were again probably more likely to be sociable, and potentially have less issues, therefore are more desirable to adopt. This introduces a confounding variable, and therefore the research is less able to establish cause and effect between institutionalisation and the developmental effects on the child. The results may have assumed that children made a good recovery, but actually, the children in the sample may have already been at a developmental advantage. However, it could be deemed unethical to randomly assign which children get adopted and which ones do not

You don’t need this for your exams, but this is an interesting case study:

Czech twins,PM and JM

PM and JM were male identical twins born in the former Czechoslovakia 1960.  Their mother died at birth.  They spent 11 months in a children’s home before being reared by their father and stepmother.  The father was of low intellect and the stepmother was particularly brutal in her treatment of the twins.  They were kept in a small closet or cellar.  They were discovered at the age of 7.  Their speech was poor and they had rickets (due to vitamin D deficiency caused by poor diet), so consequently could not walk.  They were subsequently adopted by two sisters and were well cared for.  They were tested at the age of 14 and showed no long term ill effects.  In later life they both found employment and ‘enjoyed warm relationships.’

It does appear that given favourable care a near full recovery from early privation is possible. However, The better care the twins received after being rescued was by their sister’s and this is very different to institutionalised care. 

The Influence of Early Attachments Later in Life

Internal Working Model:

Bowlby’s internal working model suggests that our first attachment(s) provide a schema for all other relationships that we’ll form in later life.  The first acts as a template that determines our expectations and a measure against which later ones can be assessed.  This concept is said to be ‘operable’ because it allows predictions to be made and importantly allows for those predictions to be tested.

Early attachments and adult relationships

Hazan and Shaver (1987): The Love Quiz’

We covered this in lesson, the reason why I have chosen this study is because it can be used in your exams for this section and Bowlby’s internal working model 🙂

Procedure:

The researchers asked people to volunteer to take part in the study. They analysed 620 replies. The questionnaires included questions about their current or most recent relationship, their general love experiences and their early relationships with parents in order to determine attachment type. 

Results:

The was a strong relationship between childhood attachment type and adult attachment type.

Those with secure attachments as babies were in happy and trusting relationships and believed in long lasting love.

Whereas people with insecure avoidant attachments had a fear of intimacy and felt that they didn’t need love to be happy.

Those with insecure resistant were felt jealous and argumentative and would worry that their partners would abandon them.

Conclusion: Early attachments could affect later, romantic attachments.

Note: from a practical point of view, poor research like this is good when it comes to writing essays or discussing points in your exams.  You can explain why the study offers support for Bowlby’s IWM but then criticise it for being correlational and various other issues such as use of self-reports. 

You can take the quiz yourself if you like, just follow the link below:

https://www.studocu.com/en-gb/document/anglia-ruskin-university/clinical-psychology/hazan-and-shaver-love-quiz/13649172

Later parenting

Harlow found that his monkeys tended to suffer a range of long term social and emotional issues (see earlier notes).  One of their deficits becoming poor parents themselves and even killing their own babies!

Bailey et al (2007)

It has also been found in humans that parenting style seems to be passed on to the next generation, probably as a part of the range of behaviours in the internal working model. 

Bailey looked at finding out how consistent attachment quality was in three generations of families. This study looked at 99 mothers who had 1 year old babies.  They measured their infant’s attachment style using the strange situation and assessed the mothers attachment style as children using interviews. They found that if mothers described poor attachments to their own parents in the interviews, they were also more likely to have children who were poorly attached in the observation. This association was also found in securely attached mother’s and babies. 

They concluded early attachment style of the mother is passed on to their children and then subsequently to future generations raising the possibility that attachment styles and parenting skills run in families.

Evaluation

Strengths:

• Myron-Wilson & Smith (1998) used a longitudinal method allows a large collection of data over time. This means they are able to see the development of behaviour without the extraneous variable of individual differences. Why is this a strength of the research?
• Research to support: There is a lot of research to support the idea of an Internal Working Model as stated above; Bailey (2007) Harlow, Bowlby, Hazan & Shaver. As there are a number of researchers who have found similar findings, this strengthens the credibility of the research. It also supports a deterministic view which can be useful in putting interventions in place. For example if we know that attachment style runs in generations, and there is a family who have been identified as insecurely attached. There could be some form of intervention or support put in place for that parent and child to ensure their attachment is more secure/positive. 
• Reliability: Hazan & Shaver used a questionnaire which has high reliability. Explain why this is the case and explain why this is a strength of the research.

Weaknesses:

• Alternate explanation: Kagan and the temperament hypothesis. This suggests that it is the child’s personality and characteristics that predict future relationships. This suggests that the IWM may not be in the only explanation, as this only focuses on the child’s experience of early relationship, and does not consider individual differences.
• Research to oppose: In terms of the theory of the IWM, there is mixed evidence. Research by Hazan and Shaver and Bailey provide support. However, research by Zimmerman (2000) assessed infant attachment type and adolescent attachment to parents. There was very little relationship between quality of infant and adolescent attachment. This is a problem because it is not what we would expect if internal working models were important in development. This theory could arguably be too deterministic as it doesn’t allow for individual differences, or the experiences of other relationships which may have more of an impact on how future relationships are formed.

• Generalisability/Individual differences: Hazan & Shaver (1987) used a self selected sampling method as they volunteered after reading an advert in the Rocky Mountain News.  This is a poor way of selecting participants since you are not getting a cross section of the public.  Using this sampling technique, for example, you are going to get people with extremes of experience or opinion. This means they may be limited in a range of individual differences. People who are shy, don’t tend to fill out personal questionnaires, therefore the findings would not fully represent them.
• Questionnaire/Interviews: People tend not to answer truthfully, particularly on issues of relationships, instead wanting to make themselves look good (social desirability)
• Validity: Retrospective: As we saw in memory our recollection of past events is not reliable, so it seems unlikely that people’s memory of their childhood experiences will be accurate
• Cause and effect:  Hazan & Shaver (1987) have shown a relationship between early attachments and later attachments or behaviour are assuming that the childhood experience has caused the adult experience.  However, other factors could be involved.  Kagan (1984) suggested the temperament hypothesis.  Children with a pleasant disposition are more likely to form warm relationships with parents and later in life, assuming they maintain their ‘niceness’, will form more loving relationships
• Validity: Much of the research in this area uses either the strange situation (to measure current attachment styles) or questionnaires and interviews (to assess attachment styles of parents when they were infants. When we looked at the strange situation we saw that the validity of the technique was questionable, some studies suggesting it was more valid than others.  However, use of self-report techniques (questionnaires and interviews) is far less valid, especially when used to collect information retrospectively.  People aren’t always honest in their reporting of childhood events and behaviour and even if they are, the fact that they are recalling information from many decades back makes this form of technique far less valid.