Orphans

Indiscriminate friendliness is particularly relevant to the study of attachment because some researchers have suggested that indiscriminately friendly behavior may be indicative of nonattachment, a term used to describe an attachment disorder that results from an infant not having had the opportunity to form an attachment relationship (Lieberman and Pawl 1988) or a reactive attachment disorder. (Zeanah 1996). A. F. Lieberman and J. H. Pawl (1988) have used the term nonattachment to describe an attachment disorder that results from an infant not having had the opportunity to form an attachment relationship. This is precisely the situation of children reared in institutions, so researchers have focused on linking this behavior to children's attachment. Kim Chisholm (1998) found that the more extreme indiscriminate behaviors (i.e., wandering without distress and being willing to go home with a stranger) were associated with insecure attachment in Ames's sample.

The question of whether orphanage children are able to form attachment relationships with their adoptive families has been of concern to both researchers and adoptive parents. Researchers have examined attachment using standard separation reunion procedures and validated coding systems.

Chisholm (1998), using Ames's sample of Romanian adoptees, found that one-third of orphanage children were securely attached to their adoptive parent, one-third were insecurely attached to their parent but in a way that is not uncommon in normative samples of children, and one-third of orphanage children displayed atypical insecure attachment patterns. Some researchers have suggested that such atypical patterns may be indicative of future psychopathology (Carlson and Sroufe 1995; Crittenden 1988a). Although all of the orphanage children formed attachments, significantly more of them displayed insecure attachment patterns than children in both the Canadian-born and early-adopted groups. This is consistent with other research on a sample of Romanian adoptees living in the Toronto area (Handley-Derry et al. 1995) and the UK sample of Romanian adoptees (Marvin and O'Connor 2000).

These findings taken together contradict claims in the early literature on institutionalized children (Goldfarb 1955; Spitz 1945), showing that orphanage children in all three of these studies were able to form attachment relationships with their adoptive parents. It is important to note, however, that these recent findings further suggest that when the attachment process does go wrong in previously institutionalized children, it may go very wrong. In Chisholm's study (1998) significantly more orphanage children than Canadian-born or earlyadopted children displayed atypical attachment patterns, which some researchers have suggested are risk factors in the development of psychopathology (Carlson and Sroufe 1995; Crittenden 1988).