It has been more than 80 years since researchers in child psychiatry first documented developmental delays among children separated from family environments and placed in orphanages or other institutions. Informed by such findings, global conventions, including the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, assert a child's right to care within a family-like environment that offers individualised support. Nevertheless, an estimated 8 million children are presently growing up in congregate care institutions. Common reasons for institutionalisation include orphaning, abandonment due to poverty, abuse in families of origin, disability, and mental illness. Although the practice remains widespread, a robust body of scientific work suggests that institutionalisation in early childhood can incur developmental damage across diverse domains. Specific deficits have been documented in areas including physical growth, cognitive function, neurodevelopment, and social-psychological health. Effects seem most pronounced when children have least access to individualised caregiving, and when deprivation coincides with early developmental sensitive periods. Offering hope, early interventions that place institutionalised children into families have afforded substantial recovery. The strength of scientific evidence imparts urgency to efforts to achieve deinstitutionalisation in global child protection sectors, and to intervene early for individual children experiencing deprivation.

We tested the capacity to perceive visual expressions of emotion, and to use those expressions as guides to social decisions, in three groups of 8- to 10-year-oldRomanian children: children abandoned to institutions then randomlyassigned to remain in ‘care as usual’ (institutional care); children abandoned to institutions then randomly assigned to a foster care intervention; and community children who had never been institutionalized. Experiment 1 examined children’s recognition of happy, sad, fearful, and angry facial expressions that varied in intensity. Children assigned to institutional care had higher thresholds for identifying happy expressions than foster care or community children, but did not differ in their thresholds for identifying the other facial expressions.Moreover, the error rates of the three groups of children were the same for all of the facial expressions. Experiment 2 examined children’s ability to use facial expressions ofemotion to guide social decisions aboutwhom to befriend andwhom tohelp.Children assigned to institutional care were less accurate than foster care orcommunity children at decidingwhom to befriend; however, the groups did not differ in their ability to decide whom to help. Overall, although there were group differences in some abilities, all three groups of children performed well across tasks. The results are discussed in the context of theoretical accounts of the development of emotion processing. Research highlights • Institutionalized children show only subtle deficits on some aspects of facial emotion processing at 8 years

Psychosocial deprivation, executive functions, and the

Effects of early institutionalization on the development of emotion processing: A case for relative sparing?