What’s Love Got to Do With It?
The tiny faces peering out between the bars of the cribs shocked the Western world back in 1990 as the full atrocity of the Romanian orphanages came to light. Romania Marxist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu had outlawed birth control and ordered women to bear more children in an attempt to increase the country’s population. In an already poor economy, many of these children were simply dumped in institutions because their parents could not cope. Children in these orphanages were not only malnourished; they were also socially abandoned with no interaction with the so-called caregivers. On average there was only one caregiver for every thirty babies. The babies lay in their own faeces, fed from bottles strapped to their cots and were hosed down with cold water when the smell became unbearable. Some babies had been left lying on their backs for so long that their heads had flattened abnormally. Harvard psychologist Chuck Nelson, who headed up the US team that studied the Romanian orphanages, described the conditions as ‘breathtakingly awful’.56 Colleagues that arrived to evaluate these children were instructed not to cry in front of them. Nelson said. ‘One of the eeriest things about these institutions is how quiet they are. Nobody’s crying.’ Their normal social bonds had been broken.
When the plight of the orphans came to light, the world descended on Romania to rescue these children. Families determined to give them a better start in life brought around 300 orphans to the United Kingdom. In the United States, Nelson and his colleagues studied 136 of them.57 How would they fare? British psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter led a team that would study 111 of these children who were less than two years of age when they first came to the UK.58 There were no medical records for these orphans and there is always the problem of knowing if an individual child suffered from congenital disorders, but the research revealed some amazingly consistent findings.
When they arrived, the orphans were mentally retarded and physically stunted with significantly smaller heads than normal children. However, by four years of age, most of this impairment had gone. Their IQs were below the average for other four-year-olds, but within the normal range that could be expected. These children seemed to be largely rehabilitated. Some had done much better than others. Orphans who were younger than six months of age when they arrived were indistinguishable from other normal British children of the same age. They made a full recovery. Their window of opportunity had not yet closed when they arrived in the UK. The longer they had been in the orphanage after six months of age, the more impaired their recovery was despite the best efforts of their adopted families.
The orphans were followed up again at six, eleven and fifteen years of age. Again as a group they fared much better than expected, given their poor start, but not all was well. Those who had spent the longest time in the orphanage were beginning to show disturbed behaviour with problems forming relationships and hyperactivity. Just as Bowlby and others had predicted, the absence of a normal social attachment during infancy had left a legacy of poor social attachment as an adult. Rutter concluded that infants younger than six months recovered fully from social deprivation, but older infants were increasingly at risk of later problems in life. While malnutrition played some role in their impaired development, it could not be the only reason. When they looked at the weight of babies when they entered the UK, this did not predict their development. Rather it was the amount of time that they had been socially isolated that played a greater role. Their ability to fit in socially had been irrevocably ruined by their isolation as infants.
Can you survive without others? Possibly. Some people have survived years in isolation. But would you want to? And what about the need for others when we are children? The Romanian orphanage studies reveal that there is something deeply fundamental about our need for interaction with others that makes social psychological development essential for our well-being. Those orphans lucky enough to be rescued in time prove that with nurturing homes and care, we can recover from the misery of isolation. However, what is shocking is how quickly isolation can permanently impair our social development. It would appear that within a year of birth, each of us needs others in order to be happy for the rest of our lives. This suggests that the sense of self that emerges over development is one that carries the legacy of early social experiences because the processes that construct the individual during this sensitive period are disrupted. In other words, the developing human brain critically expects input from others and, if this is not available, it has lasting impact on the epigenesis of normal social behaviour.
Monkey Love
The Romanian orphans responded similarly to the rhesus monkeys in Harry Harlow’s infamous isolation studies during the 1960s.59 Harlow had been inspired by Bowlby’s theory of why children raised in orphanages develop antisocial behaviour, but he wanted to rule out the alternative explanations that these were children from poorer backgrounds or that poor nutrition in the institutions had led to these effects. To test this, he raised infant rhesus monkeys in total social isolation for varying amounts of time (these studies would never be approved today now that we know how similar monkeys are to humans). Despite feeding them and keeping them warm, those monkeys that spent at least the first six months of life in total isolation developed abnormally. They compulsively rocked back and forth while biting themselves and found it difficult to interact with other monkeys. When they became mothers themselves, they ignored or sometimes attacked their own babies. The social deprivation they had experienced as infants had left them as socially retarded adults. If they were introduced to the rest of the monkeys before the six months was up, then they recovered more social behaviours. Monkeys that were only isolated after the first six months were not affected. Clearly monkeys and humans from birth require something more than sustenance. It isn’t food and warmth they need, it is love – without the love of others, we are lost as individuals, unable to form the social behaviours that are so necessary to becoming a normal social animal.
What is it about social isolation that is so destructive for the developing primate? There is no simple answer and one can speculate about different mechanisms. For example, babies who are born extremely prematurely can spend several weeks isolated in an incubator to provide a suitable breathing and sterile environment for their immature lungs. Not only are they born too early, but they are also very small and have a low birthweight. However, if you interact with them by stroking them and massaging them while they are still inside the incubator, this minimal contact significantly improves their physical development. They grow and put on weight much faster than premature babies left alone. The most likely explanation comes from animal studies that show that grooming and tactile contact stimulate the release of growth hormones in the brain. These growth hormones affect metabolism and the calorific uptake so that these little guys can absorb more from their food. In the United States, psychologist Tiffany Field60 has shown that simply stroking premature babies for fifteen minutes each day for ten days leads to significantly increased body weight, an earlier discharge from hospital and an estimated saving of around $10,000 for each infant. It may all seem a little too touchy-feely, but massaging babies makes sound financial sense on top of all the health benefits.
It’s not just weight gain; brains also thrive with social interaction. As noted above, rat pups like a bit of rough-and-tumble play. In the 1940s Donald Hebb,61 looked at the effects of raising baby rats in complete isolation compared to those raised in social cages containing lots of other rats with which to interact. He found that not only were isolated rats significantly slower on problem solving, such as running around a maze, but their brains were not as well developed as the social rats, which had heavier brains and thicker cortical areas. If you remember back to the wiring illustration in Chapter 1 (Figure 5), this thicker cortex was due to increased connectivity between the neurons. So being raised in isolation is not healthy for a social animal.62 We now know that loneliness stunts growth and impairs the health of humans, monkeys, rabbits, pigs, rats, mice and even the humble fruit fly, ‘Drosophila’63 – and the Drosophila does not even have much of a cortex let alone brain!