Privation is where no attachment bond has been formed so there is no opportunity for attachments to form. It is different to deprivation, as it is where there has been no attachment figure to start off with. This is often harder to study as even when attachment figures are bad influences on the child they still have an attachment figure, whereas children who have suffered privation have not had this bond at all. It is known as the 'forbidden experiment' as this is immoral and unethical to test if you wanted to condition someone to be raised with privation. In the rare case that an infant has suffered with privation future relationships are said to be much more affected than those who have simply just been deprived.
Studies that are of the most interest to me are those of feral children, these are children who have been abandoned and raised by packs of dogs for which their behaviours and norms have changed to copy those of the dogs. This is often used by behaviourist psychologists as it is easier to argue that role models and people in your environment influence your behaviour as opposed to a biological or evolutionary perspective. Children such as Oxana and Aveyron have been studied and attempts to rehabilitate them into society and experiments in helping them learn normal human behaviours have been carried out.
Curtiss who famously studied the case of Genie a feral child found that severe privation has permanent irreversible effects as attempts to change her behaviours were effective but only to a small extent, she never fully overcame her behaviours and tendencies to which she was brought up with. On the other hand Koluchova 1991 found that Czechoslovakian twin boys overcame any negative effects of being neglected and lived normal lives in education as well as both raising families.
Romanian orphan studies have been very useful in studying privation, as the sample size is so large it has allowed several children to be studied, these children were living in inhumane conditions, whilst being malnourished, having no toys and having minimal social interaction causing devastating effects. These orphanages were found and it caused a public outcry with many people in the UK adopting the children and taking them out of such inhumane conditions. Many studies took place which were longitudinal to see the effects on the rest of these infants lives. Kreppner er al 1999 studied 104 children who were adopted before the age of 2 and found that these children has a lower frequency of pretend play and a lower ability to appreciate other peoples' mental states. This is supported by the work of Rutter et al 2007 who found that these children had quasi- autistic like symptoms such as communication difficulties and stereotyped behaviours.
The problem with using Romanian orphanages when studying privation is that the results are difficult to generalise as even with the huge sample that was used there is also a huge variation in individual differences, the level of care and socialisation must effectively be studied in the families that these children were adopted into, however most research suggests some long term damage taking place when privation has occured.
