Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation. Romanian orphan studies: effects of institutionalisation.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain Bowlby's maternal deprivation theory and the effects of institutionalisation shown by Romanian orphan studies. The exam skill is to keep deprivation and privation distinct, to know the 44 thieves study and the Romanian orphan findings, and to argue that the effects are serious but not always permanent.

Bowlby's theory

Bowlby drew a sharp line between separation (a brief absence) and deprivation (a prolonged loss of emotional care that has damaging consequences), and argued the damage depends on whether care is provided by a substitute. He proposed that deprivation during the critical period (the first two and a half years, with continuing risk up to about five) interferes with normal emotional and intellectual development. The emotional consequence he highlighted was affectionless psychopathy, a lack of guilt, empathy or remorse that makes it hard to form relationships, and he linked this to delinquency. His evidence was the 44 thieves study (1944), in which he interviewed 44 juvenile thieves and a control group; he found 14 of the thieves could be described as affectionless psychopaths, and of those 14, most had experienced prolonged early separation from their mothers. The study is much criticised, however: it was retrospective and conducted by Bowlby himself (so prone to bias), and it shows only a correlation, so it cannot prove that early separation caused the affectionless psychopathy.

Romanian orphan studies

The Romanian orphan studies became possible after 1989, when many children raised in severely deprived institutions were adopted into UK and US families, allowing a natural experiment on the effects of early institutional care. Rutter's English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study followed over 160 Romanian orphans. Children adopted before six months caught up and developed near-normally, whereas those adopted later showed lasting deficits: lower IQ and disinhibited attachment, an attention-seeking, indiscriminately friendly style towards all adults including strangers. The later the adoption, the greater the deficit, which strongly supports the idea of a sensitive period for recovery. Zeanah's Bucharest Early Intervention project compared institutionalised children with a fostered control group and found the institutionalised group were far more likely to show disorganised and insecure attachment. Together these studies extend Bowlby's account from short-term separation to long-term institutional privation, while the recovery of early-adopted children shows that the effects are not always permanent if good care is provided in time.