The Effects of Social Isolation

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bulmabriefs144

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So, my last essential article was rejected on basis of being largely opinion and not really essential. Let's try again.

There's always debates on nature and nurture, but let's weigh in, shall we?

In the 19th century France, infants were breast fed by foster parents (don't ask), with no apparent difference in development. This suggested that it isn't necessarily the birth mother that influences development and a suitable replacement can be used, provided they were fit. It didn't even appear the gender mattered.

In the 1930s, David Levy noticed that foster-raised children had what he called "primary affect hunger." They were polite and pleasant, but didn't appear to care about anything or anyone. In one institution affected by his theories, signs saying "Wash your hands twice before entering this ward" were replaced by "do not enter this nursery without picking up a baby."

But this would just be a case for breastfeeding and/or ensuring children had proper care if the studies ended here. Well, in the twenties and thirties (and to a lesser extent all the way up to recently), there was an obsession with sterility. A combination of cleanliness obsession and a branch of psychology known as behaviorism gave two causes why parents or at least institutions shouldn't touch children: (1) it might give them diseases, and (2) to avoid "spoiling" children.

In psychology classes, however, there is an urban legend, likely made by proponents of nurture theories, that goes something like this:

Twenty newborn infants were housed in a special facility. They had caregivers who would go in to feed them, bathe them and change their diapers, but they would do nothing else. The caregivers had been instructed not to look at or touch the babies more than was necessary, and they never spoke to them. All their physical needs were attended to scrupulously, however. The environment was kept sterile; the babies were never ill.

The experiment was halted after four months. At least half of the babies had died at that point, at least two more died even after being rescued and brought into a more normal environment. There was no physiological cause for the babies' deaths; they were all physically very healthy. Before each baby died, there was a period where they would stop verbalizing and trying to engage their caregivers, and just stop moving, never cry or change expression. Death would follow shortly. The babies who had "given up" before being rescued died in the same manner, even though they had been removed from the experimental conditions.

The problem is, of course, that this experiment has no source that I could find. And it seems too inhumane to have been done even by the most detached scientists. However...

John Bowlby, who coined the term maternal deprivation. He theorized that two things were critical in development, the presence/absence of a parent, and the emotional state of the parent. He found that in fourteen thieves with "affectionless character" twelve of them had been separated from their parents for a length of time.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/...-early-deprivation-derails-child-development/

In Romania, where a ban on abortion meant many such children went to orphanages. These children generally developed social avoidance problems, either lacking affection or being loving to anyone in sight, or sharp swings of both. Others had symptoms similar to autism. The Romanian institutions blamed such problems on their original parents.

So tests were done, with monkeys (sorry, the human testing is still an urban legend). Harry Harlow did a series of such tests. His first was raising monkeys with himself and his fellow researchers in a nursery. These had strange quirks, such as standoffish behavior and a fixation with their diapers, but were otherwise healthy. But behaviorists claimed that the monkeys didn't care so much about the nurturer, the main relationship with the mother was food. Next, he made two surrogate mothers, one of cloth and one of wire, and did experiments like having the one with wire have food nearby and the one of cloth without. The wire one was visited only to feed, the cloth was preferred for prolonged visits. He then did a fear test using a noisemaker. When the "parent" was absent, the monkeys cowered, when it was present they were far less likely to do so. He found both children of these "mothers" were the same body weight, but the wire-raised monkeys had diarrhea and difficulty with digestion (which he attributed to the stress of not being able to hold the surrogate).

He next tried experiments with partial isolation. The monkeys could see other monkeys, but had no way of touching them. Partial isolation for some of these was up to 15 years, and produced monkeys who stared blankly, circled their cages, and bit or scratched themselves. Total isolation produced even more profound effects even within only 3 months. Pulling them out of isolation put them into shock, complete with autistic symptoms (self-clutching and rocking), and one of them starved to death after such shock. The six and twelve month monkeys were completely messed up socially. The time frame also made a difference, monkeys who were put in such isolation from infancy generally did not recover the effects, while monkeys with later isolation could bounce back more easily. He then tried to rehabilitate these monkeys with varying effects. They generally did not recover when introduced to their peers. They had normal maternal instincts when exposed to small children, but no other recovery. They appeared to recover fully only by being exposed to slightly younger monkeys. (Just in case you were curious, when the isolates were exposed to surrogates, they learned to interact but mainly with themselves).

After the death of his wife, he constructed a cage known as the pit of despair. This was actually a departure from maternal attachment theories, as here he was investigating the effects of depression and loneliness (guess why). He put monkeys in a cage, giving them only food or water. In a few days of isolation, the monkeys huddled in a corner, and after a few months, they were incapable of the social means to initiate mating. So, along with being isolated, they got assaulted thanks to another device of his, producing (not surprisingly) abusive monkey parents. Since this didn't really get the right results (it was more a study in cruelty), he made a simple high pit cage with slippery sides, and put otherwise happy monkeys in there. They generally came out depressed through a combination of loneliness and despair.

But this is just monkeys right, surely it doesn't relate to humans?

Remember the thing about isolation, replaced with a surrogate, becomes strange and interacts alot with themselves? I grew up with loving but busy parents. They'd often have late nights where they'd need to leave for some such meeting. I remember at some point, some nurse friend at my mom's work told her "you can leave them without a babysitter, just tell them where you'll be and when you should be back." So I learned to keep myself entertained (surrogate) with videogames. I now have symptoms remarkably similar to this.

Although we can't for certain say the cause is not entirely out of the field of genetics, there appears to be strong correlation between:

  1. Loneliness and imprisonment with a whole range of problems.
  2. Neglect with autistic conditions.
  3. Parental surrogates with strange social behavior.
  4. Parental abandonment or lack of affection with flattened personality.
  5. Loss and despair with general depression.
  6. Abuse with child abuse.

We could further apply this both to foster system in place around the world, prison system, and other facilities, but also with understanding the underlying causes of many of our problems in regard to family.
 

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