PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES AND FUNCTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ADAPTATION SYSTEMS OF INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILDREN
Objective. To determine the psychological features and functional characteristics of the adaptation systems of institutionalized children. Material and methods. The study included 114 preschool children (3-5.5 years old) from Republican Specialized Children's Home in Donetsk. The data were compared with the control group - 44 peers from families. The groups were comparable in gender and age. Psychological examination included: parental Questionnaires to determine the levels of anxiety and aggressiveness in children, The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, the anxiety test «Choose the right person», the method «Steam Train». The «Formalized map of the study of neuropsychiatric functions in children of the first 7 years of life» was used to evaluate the level of neuropsychiatric development. Laboratory examination included: assessment of saliva cortisol and melatonin levels, as well as brain neurotrophic factor in blood serum. Heart rate variability data were obtained by recording plethysmograms with a UTAS-300 heart monitor. Results. Children from the children's home have lower values of Developmental Quotient than children from families on all eleven scales (p < 0.0001). On the «Emotions and Communication» scale, the lowest maximum of all scales was noted (93 DQ). We can talk about a uniformly reduced emotional background in the children's home. The questionnaires of G. P. Lavrentieva and T. M. Titarenko revealed high levels of anxiety in children from the orphanage, which were confirmed by the results of the «Choose the right person» test and the «Steam Train» technique. The correlation analysis revealed that morning values of melatonin positively correlated with indicators of anxiety (r = 0.19) and sustained aggressiveness (r = 0.23). Cortisol levels in the morning portion had a direct statistically significant relationship with anxiety (r = 0.29), situational (r = 0.26) and sustained aggressiveness (r = 0.31). Evening cortisol levels positively correlated with sustained aggressiveness (r = 0.25) and the «Steam Train» score (r = 0.19). The levels of the brain neurotrophic factor positively correlated with the indicators on the neuropsychiatric development scales «Expressive speech» (r = 0.20) and «Intelligence» (r = 0.21), and negative - with anxiety (r = -0.23) and sustained aggressiveness (r = -0.30). Conclusions. Our study revealed a number of psychological problems and confirmed the pathogenetic role of changes in the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system in the violation of neuropsychiatric development in institutionalized children.