WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 2, 2007 - Anna Smyke, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and neurology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, will discuss the effects of alternative forms of care on abandoned and neglected children of Bucharest, Romania on Monday, April 2, at Williams College.

Her lecture titled "Understanding the Effects of Orphanage Care on Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project" is scheduled for Wege Auditorium in the Thompson Chemistry Laboratory at 4 p.m.

Smyke is the director of the Foster Care Team on developmental and behavioral evaluation and treatment of young foster children and director of the Tulane/JPHSA Infant Team. Her research interests include attachment disorders, high-risk parenting, and the effects of maltreatment on young children.

She coordinated the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a four-year controlled trial of foster care as an intervention for the institutionalized children of Bucharest, Romania. More than 130 children were assessed and randomized to routine institutional care, and then compared to 65 children that had never been institutionalized.

The study assessed the impact of institutional care on children's cognition, language and social communication skills, attachment, temperament, facial discrimination and emotion. Its aim was to match these effects to different domains of child development and to identify the relationship between characteristics of care giving and outcomes.

This is a Class of 1960 Scholars Lecture in Psychology. It is free and open to the public.

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Event: Cristina Florea