the baby monkey experiment

Harry Harlow Theory & Rhesus Monkey Experiments in Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Harlow (1958 wanted to study the mechanisms by which newborn rhesus monkeys bond with their mothers.

These infants depended highly on their mothers for nutrition, protection, comfort, and socialization.  What, exactly, though, was the basis of the bond?

The learning theory of attachment suggests that an infant would form an attachment with a carer who provides food. In contrast, Harlow explained that attachment develops due to the mother providing “tactile comfort,” suggesting that infants have an innate (biological) need to touch and cling to something for emotional comfort.

Harry Harlow did a number of studies on attachment in rhesus monkeys during the 1950’s and 1960″s.  His experiments took several forms:

Cloth Mother vs. Wire Mother Experiment

Experiment 1.

Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry toweling cloth.

In the first group, the terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk.

Both groups of monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother (even if she had no milk).  The infant would only go to the wire mother when hungry. Once fed it would return to the cloth mother for most of the day.  If a frightening object was placed in the cage the infant took refuge with the cloth mother (its safe base).

This surrogate was more effective in decreasing the youngster’s fear.  The infant would explore more when the cloth mother was present.

This supports the evolutionary theory of attachment , in that the sensitive response and security of the caregiver are important (as opposed to the provision of food).

Experiment 2

Harlow (1958) modified his experiment and separated the infants into two groups: the terrycloth mother which provided no food, or the wire mother which did.

All the monkeys drank equal amounts and grew physically at the same rate. But the similarities ended there. Monkeys who had soft, tactile contact with their terry cloth mothers behaved quite differently than monkeys whose mothers were made out of hard wire.

The behavioral differences that Harlow observed between the monkeys who had grown up with surrogate mothers and those with normal mothers were;

• They were much more timid.
• They didn’t know how to act with other monkeys.
• They were easily bullied and wouldn’t stand up for themselves.
• They had difficulty with mating.
• The females were inadequate mothers.

These behaviors were observed only in the monkeys left with the surrogate mothers for more than 90 days.

For those left less than 90 days, the effects could be reversed if placed in a normal environment where they could form attachments.

Rhesus Monkeys Reared in Isolation

Harlow (1965) took babies and isolated them from birth. They had no contact with each other or anybody else.

He kept some this way for three months, some for six, some for nine and some for the first year of their lives. He then put them back with other monkeys to see what effect their failure to form attachment had on behavior.

The results showed the monkeys engaged in bizarre behavior, such as clutching their own bodies and rocking compulsively. They were then placed back in the company of other monkeys.

To start with the babies were scared of the other monkeys, and then became very aggressive towards them. They were also unable to communicate or socialize with other monkeys. The other monkeys bullied them. They indulged in self-mutilation, tearing hair out, scratching, and biting their own arms and legs.<!–

In addition, Harlow created a state of anxiety in female monkeys which had implications once they became parents. Such monkeys became so neurotic that they smashed their infant’s face into the floor and rubbed it back and forth.

Harlow concluded that privation (i.e., never forming an attachment bond) is permanently damaging (to monkeys).

The extent of the abnormal behavior reflected the length of the isolation. Those kept in isolation for three months were the least affected, but those in isolation for a year never recovered from the effects of privation.

Conclusions

Studies of monkeys raised with artificial mothers suggest that mother-infant emotional bonds result primarily from mothers providing infants with comfort and tactile contact, rather than just fulfilling basic needs like food.

Harlow concluded that for a monkey to develop normally s/he must have some interaction with an object to which they can cling during the first months of life (critical period).

Clinging is a natural response – in times of stress the monkey runs to the object to which it normally clings as if the clinging decreases the stress.

He also concluded that early maternal deprivation leads to emotional damage but that its impact could be reversed in monkeys if an attachment was made before the end of the critical period .

However, if maternal deprivation lasted after the end of the critical period, then no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the emotional damage that had already occurred.

Harlow found, therefore, that it was social deprivation rather than maternal deprivation that the young monkeys were suffering from.

When he brought some other infant monkeys up on their own, but with 20 minutes a day in a playroom with three other monkeys, he found they grew up to be quite normal emotionally and socially.

The Impact of Harlow’s Research

Harlow’s research has helped social workers to understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse such as a lack of comfort (and so intervene to prevent it).

Using animals to study attachment can benefit children who are most at risk in society and can also have later economic implications, as those children are more likely to grow up to be productive members of society.

Ethics of Harlow’s Study

Harlow’s work has been criticized.  His experiments have been seen as unnecessarily cruel (unethical) and of limited value in attempting to understand the effects of deprivation on human infants.

It was clear that the monkeys in this study suffered from emotional harm from being reared in isolation.  This was evident when the monkeys were placed with a normal monkey (reared by a mother), they sat huddled in a corner in a state of persistent fear and depression.

Harlow’s experiment is sometimes justified as providing a valuable insight into the development of attachment and social behavior. At the time of the research, there was a dominant belief that attachment was related to physical (i.e., food) rather than emotional care.

It could be argued that the benefits of the research outweigh the costs (the suffering of the animals).  For example, the research influenced the theoretical work of John Bowlby , the most important psychologist in attachment theory.

It could also be seen as vital in convincing people about the importance of emotional care in hospitals, children’s homes, and daycare.

Harlow, H. F., Dodsworth, R. O., & Harlow, M. K. (1965). Total social isolation in monkeys . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 54 (1), 90.

Harlow, H. F. & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affective responsiveness in infant monkeys . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102 ,501 -509.

Harlow’s Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact

• Child Development
• Cognitive Psychology
• Infant Development
• Social Interaction
• Social Isolation
• Social Psychology

Harry Harlow’s empirical work with primates is now considered a “classic” in behavioral science, revolutionizing our understanding of the role that social relationships play in early development. In the 1950s and 60s, psychological research in the United States was dominated by behaviorists and psychoanalysts, who supported the view that babies became attached to their mothers because they provided food. Harlow and other social and cognitive psychologists argued that this perspective overlooked the importance of comfort, companionship, and love in promoting healthy development.

Using methods of isolation and maternal deprivation, Harlow showed the impact of contact comfort on primate development. Infant rhesus monkeys were taken away from their mothers and raised in a laboratory setting, with some infants placed in separate cages away from peers. In social isolation, the monkeys showed disturbed behavior, staring blankly, circling their cages, and engaging in self-mutilation. When the isolated infants were re-introduced to the group, they were unsure of how to interact — many stayed separate from the group, and some even died after refusing to eat.

Even without complete isolation, the infant monkeys raised without mothers developed social deficits, showing reclusive tendencies and clinging to their cloth diapers. Harlow was interested in the infants’ attachment to the cloth diapers, speculating that the soft material may simulate the comfort provided by a mother’s touch. Based on this observation, Harlow designed his now-famous surrogate mother experiment.

In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. The infants were assigned to one of two conditions. In the first, the wire mother had a milk bottle and the cloth mother did not; in the second, the cloth mother had the food while the wire mother had none.

In both conditions, Harlow found that the infant monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry cloth mother than they did with the wire mother. When only the wire mother had food, the babies came to the wire mother to feed and immediately returned to cling to the cloth surrogate.

Harlow’s work showed that infants also turned to inanimate surrogate mothers for comfort when they were faced with new and scary situations. When placed in a novel environment with a surrogate mother, infant monkeys would explore the area, run back to the surrogate mother when startled, and then venture out to explore again. Without a surrogate mother, the infants were paralyzed with fear, huddled in a ball sucking their thumbs. If an alarming noise-making toy was placed in the cage, an infant with a surrogate mother present would explore and attack the toy; without a surrogate mother, the infant would cower in fear.

Together, these studies produced groundbreaking empirical evidence for the primacy of the parent-child attachment relationship and the importance of maternal touch in infant development. More than 70 years later, Harlow’s discoveries continue to inform the scientific understanding of the fundamental building blocks of human behavior.

Harlow H. F., Dodsworth R. O., & Harlow M. K. (1965). Total social isolation in monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC285801/pdf/pnas00159-0105.pdf

Suomi, S. J., & Leroy, H. A. (1982). In memoriam: Harry F. Harlow (1905–1981). American Journal of Primatology, 2 , 319–342. doi:10.1002/ajp.1350020402

Tavris, C. A. (2014). Teaching contentious classics. The Association for Psychological Science . Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/teaching-contentious-classics

Loved the simplicity of article but wanted to Apa cite it but didn’t see a name who wrote it

typed a partial comment and was disrupted and never got around to sending it. I tried to relocate it on my computer, but was not able. Could have been my thoughts. As a substitute teacher I see the results of giving a child a phone rather than giving a child love and all that goes with it. I see the predictions of Harry Harlow have come to pass. No absolutes, no positive examples, no investment of time, just looking for the allusive moment of quality time, that requires an investment TIME to be there for that moment in time. Any way I’m probably not the one you’re looking for.

The above summary fails to address any critique of Harlow’s legacy. Nothing about use of Harlow’s “pit of despair,” or his “rape rack” to use his own term? Nothing about beginning “his harsher isolation and depression experiments while “corrosively depressed” and “stumbling around drunk”? No concern about any possibility of sadism as “science”? No question of “how much suffering is justified by the imperatives of science”? For starters, see S. Hansen’s 11/13/2002 salon.com review of Deborah Blum’s Love at Goon Park, or the essay on Harlow in psychologist Loren Slater’s book, Opening Skinner’s Box.

Gigi, the sole reason for the experiment was not to root out sadism, it was to explain the need for attachment. Sorry about the special feelings you have for animals. It is a good point you let us see, you can now use that opportunity to show us sadism in regards to the research they made. I will search that article you point out to see what that author had to say about sadism.

I read these these experiments when they were published in the Scientific American journals.

I find he article a good review of the original work.

I worked in Harlow’s lab as as an undergraduate student in 1951/52. What I learned from this experience is the value of facts and verified statements about animal behavior. As a 20 year old kid discharged from the army, I was severely reprimanded for stating that a monkey had bit me in anger when I slapped its paw for trying to steal reasons out of lab coat. I was bitten but I invented the reason. Our work was to flesh out the phylo-genetic scale. Along with just learning studies, with white rats as well.

And what did you discover?

Wow that’s amazing you worked in the lab, I think so just starting out in psychology and my first lesson was Harlow. It’s was very interesting learning about him, my only thought was the monkeys have to admit but that was done in those days. Thanks Sue

I agree that in this day and age, we would criticize this treatment. I have no doubt much of it still goes on, people still eat animals. That was a different time, we learn from the past so that we do not repeat it. But to be angry about the past or that someone could find the good research that was deemed from it is histrionic and a waste of positive energy.

Are you people insane? “I agree that in this day and age, we would criticize this treatment” I was raised in exactly in accord with Harlow’s experiments, denied human contact almost since birth. And you APPROVE of this?! “That was a different time, we learn from the past so that we do not repeat it.” Oh, you know so little. Look up “secure confinement” and consider what children face every day of their lives.

I agree with Harry’s theory.

I also find it sadistic or at least totally lacking in sensitivity and compassion to have torn these baby monkeys from their mothers to learn what.That they prefer warmth to a hard screen even when food is involved? It is this kind of thinking that leads to the willingness of politicians to separate families, putting children in cages so that they will be less likely to come to America for help. Truly sadistic!

I think we need like a chat forum for discussion about these issues honestly. I’d love to debate about this stuff actually and am wondering whether any means is sufficient. In regards to the actual experiment, Im not going to get my beliefs on ethical treatment mixed up and it did produce significant findings. I’m more upset about the actual findings themselves. It could also be because I see some very loose correlation between them and my life unfortunately. The published paper was definitely worth the read and I wish I didn’t.

I think the whole point is that the experiments show why politicians should NOT separate families etc.. it’s difficult to prove the effects of cruelty without being cruel. The alarming thing is how little has been learned from the sacrifice. I know a young woman with learning difficulties, abandonment issues and probable RAD who is in care. She has created a fantasy world with cuddly toys. She is chastised for this by her ‘carers’ who confiscate them and make her feel guilty about her self. I am currently composing a letter for social services to intervene. I intend enclosing the above article. Everyone who works in care should be made to read it!

I studied psychology as an undergrad several years ago, and of the cognitive development experiments that made it into academic text, Harlow’s was one that has always stuck in my mind. To refer to the outcomes and substantiated findings of studies such as these, without acknowledging the cruelty perpetuated in carrying them out, might be impossible. The two go hand in hand, and that’s the point. But years later, can we say the ends justified the means? Yes…and no. Studies such as this one, were done years ago, perhaps in a time with very different regulations; however, the findings are none the less very substantial. And, I personally believe could, and should, be referred to in the training of a variety of service and caregiver professions, as this last comment suggests. There is still much to be learned in Behavioral science area of study, but as a society in need of great change as a whole, we should be working to figure out how we can capitalize on the knowledge gained from past studies such as this one…as opposed to focusing solely on the conditions in which they were done in. That’s not to allow our emotions to diminish the importance of the findings, without putting them to good use in our everyday lives. The end goal being to make a positive difference in society moving forward.

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This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same Way to See What Would Happen

When treated as a human, the baby chimp acted like one—until her physiology and development held her back

Rachel Nuwer

On June 26, 1931, comparative psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife welcomed a new arrival home: not a human infant, but a baby chimpanzee. The couple planned to raise the chimp, Gua, alongside their own baby boy, Donald. As later described in the  Psychological Record , the idea was to see how environment influenced development. Could a chimp grow up to behave like a human? Or even think it was a human? 

Since his student days, Kellogg had dreamed of conducting such an experiment. He was fascinated by wild children, or those raised with no human contact, often in nature. Abandoning a human child in the wilderness would be ethically reprehensible, Kellogg knew, so he opted to experiment on the reverse scenario—bringing an infant animal into civilization. 

For the next nine months, for 12 hours a day and seven days a week, Kellogg and his wife conducted tireless tests on Donald and Gua.

They raised the two babies in exactly the same way, in addition to conducting an exhaustive list of scientific experiments that included subjects such as "blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span and others," the  Psychological Record authors note.

For a while, Gua actually excelled at these tests compared to Donald.

But eventually,  as  NPR notes , Gua hit a cognitive wall: No amount of training or nurturing could overcome the fact that, genetically, she was a chimpanzee. As such, the Psychological Record  authors write, the Kelloggs' experiment "probably succeeded better than any study before its time in demonstrating the limitations heredity placed on an organism regardless of environmental opportunities as well as the developmental gains that could be made in enriched environments."

The experiment, however, ended rather abruptly and mysteriously. As the Psychological Record  authors describe: 

Our final concern is why the project ended when it did. We are told only that the study was terminated on March 28, 1932, when Gua was returned to the Orange Park primate colony through a gradual rehabilitating process. But as for why, the Kelloggs, who are so specific on so many other points, leave the reader wondering. 

It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua's chimp noises. "In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study," the authors write.

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Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.

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Harry Harlow and the Nature of Affection

What Harlow's Infamous Monkey Mother Experiments Revealed

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Adah Chung is a fact checker, writer, researcher, and occupational therapist. 

• Love and Affection
• Harry Harlow's Research on Love
• Wire Mother Experiment
• Fear and Security

Impact of Harry Harlow’s Research

Frequently asked questions.

Harry Harlow was one of the first psychologists to scientifically investigate the nature of human love and affection. Through a series of controversial monkey mother experiments, Harlow was able to demonstrate the importance of early attachments, affection, and emotional bonds in the course of healthy development.

This article discusses his famous monkey mother experiments and what the results revealed. It also explores why Harlow's monkey experiments are so unethical and controversial.

Early Research On Love

During the first half of the 20th century, many psychologists believed that showing affection towards children was merely a sentimental gesture that served no real purpose. According to many thinkers of the day, affection would only spread diseases and lead to adult psychological problems.

"When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument," the behaviorist John B. Watson once even went so far as to warn parents.

Psychologists were motivated to prove their field as a rigorous science. The behaviorist movement dominated the field of psychology during this time. This approach urged researchers to study only observable and measurable behaviors.

An American psychologist named Harry Harlow , however, became interested in studying a topic that was not so easy to quantify and measure—love. In a series of controversial experiments conducted during the 1960s, Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love and in particular, the absence of love.   

His work demonstrated the devastating effects of deprivation on young rhesus monkeys. Harlow's research revealed the importance of a caregiver's love for healthy childhood development.

Harlow's experiments were often unethical and shockingly cruel , yet they uncovered fundamental truths that have influenced our understanding of child development.

Harry Harlow's Research on Love

Harlow noted that very little attention had been devoted to the experimental research of love. At the time, most observations were largely philosophical and anecdotal.

"Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalysts ," he noted.

Many of the existing theories of love centered on the idea that the earliest attachment between a mother and child was merely a means for the child to obtain food, relieve thirst, and avoid pain. Harlow, however, believed that this behavioral view of mother-child attachments was an inadequate explanation.

The Monkey Mother Experiment

His most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different "mothers." One was made of soft terrycloth but provided no food. The other was made of wire but provided nourishment from an attached baby bottle.

Harlow removed young monkeys from their natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be "raised" by these mother surrogates. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with their cloth mother than with their wire mother.

In other words, the infant monkeys went to the wire mother only for food but preferred to spend their time with the soft, comforting cloth mother when they were not eating.

Based on these findings, Harry Harlow concluded that affection was the primary force behind the need for closeness.

Harry Harlow's Further Research

Later research demonstrated that young monkeys would also turn to their cloth surrogate mother for comfort and security. Such work revealed that affectionate bonds were critical for development.

Harlow utilized a "strange situation" technique similar to the one created by attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth . Young monkeys were allowed to explore a room either in the presence of their surrogate mother or in her absence.

Monkeys who were with their cloth mother would use her as a secure base to explore the room. When the surrogate mothers were removed from the room, the effects were dramatic. The young monkeys no longer had their secure base for exploration and would often freeze up, crouch, rock, scream, and cry.

Harry Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital for normal childhood development . Additional experiments by Harlow revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to profound psychological and emotional distress and even death.

Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups, and childcare providers approached the care of children.

Harlow's work led to acclaim and generated a wealth of research on love, affection, and interpersonal relationships. However, his own personal life was marked by conflict.

After the terminal illness of his wife, he became engulfed by alcohol misuse and depression, eventually becoming estranged from his own children. Colleagues frequently described him as sarcastic, mean-spirited, misanthropic, chauvinistic, and cruel.

While he was treated for depression and eventually returned to work, his interests shifted following the death of his wife. He no longer focused on maternal attachment and instead developed an interest in depression and isolation.

Despite the turmoil that marked his later personal life, Harlow's enduring legacy reinforced the importance of emotional support, affection, and love in the development of children.

A Word From Verywell

Harry Harlow's work was controversial in his own time and continues to draw criticism today. While such experiments present major ethical dilemmas, his work helped inspire a shift in the way that we think about children and development and helped researchers better understand both the nature and importance of love.

Harlow's research demonstrated the importance of love and affection, specifically contact comfort, for healthy childhood development. His research demonstrated that children become attached to caregivers that provide warmth and love, and that this love is not simply based on providing nourishment. 

Harlow's monkey mother experiment was unethical because of the treatment of the infant monkeys. The original monkey mother experiments were unnecessarily cruel. The infant monkeys were deprived of maternal care and social contact.

In later experiments, Harlow kept monkeys in total isolation in what he himself dubbed a "pit of despair." While the experiments provided insight into the importance of comfort contact for early childhood development, the research was cruel and unethical.

Hu TY, Li J, Jia H, Xie X. Helping others, warming yourself: altruistic behaviors increase warmth feelings of the ambient environment . Front Psychol . 2016;7:1349. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01349

Suomi SJ. Risk, resilience, and gene-environment interplay in primates . J Can Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry . 2011;20(4):289-297.

Zhang B. Consequences of early adverse rearing experience(EARE) on development: insights from non-human primate studies . Zool Res . 2017;38(1):7-35. doi:10.13918/j.issn.2095-8137.2017.002

Harlow HF. The nature of love .  American Psychologist. 1958;13(12):673-685. doi:10.1037/h0047884

Hong YR, Park JS. Impact of attachment, temperament and parenting on human development . Korean J Pediatr . 2012;55(12):449-454. doi:10.3345/kjp.2012.55.12.449

Blum D. Love at Goon Park . New York: Perseus Publishing; 2011.

Ottaviani J, Meconis D. Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love . Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs; 2007.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Harlow’s Monkey Experiments: 3 Findings About Attachment

When that need is met, the infant develops a secure attachment style; however, when that need is not met, the infant can develop an attachment disorder.

In this post, we’ll briefly explore attachment theory by looking at Harlow’s monkey experiments and how those findings relate to human behavior and attachment styles. We’ll also look at some of the broader research that resulted from Harlow’s experiments.

Before we begin, I have to warn you that Harlow’s experiments are distressing and can be upsetting. Nowadays, his experiments are considered unethical and would most likely not satisfy the requirements of an ethical board. However, knowing this, the findings of his research do provide insight into the important mammalian bond that exists between infant and parent.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients build healthy, life-enriching relationships.

This Article Contains:

Harlow’s experiments: a brief summary, three fascinating findings & their implications, its connection to love and attachment theory, follow-up and related experiments, criticisms of harlow’s experiments, ethical considerations of harlow’s experiments, relevant positivepsychology.com resources, a take-home message.

Harry Harlow was trained as a psychologist, and in 1930 he was employed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His areas of expertise were in infant–caregiver relationships, infant dependency and infant needs, and social deprivation and isolation. He is also well known for his research using rhesus monkeys.

Maternal surrogates: Food versus comfort

For his experiments, Harlow (1958) separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers. He then constructed two surrogate ‘mothers’ for the infants: one surrogate made out of metal but that provided milk through an artificial nipple, the other surrogate covered in soft, fluffy material but that didn’t offer food.

The first surrogate delivered food but provided no comfort; the second did not deliver food, but the rhesus infants were able to cuddle with it.

When both surrogates were placed in the infants’ cages, Harlow found the surrogates satisfied different needs of the rhesus infants. The wire surrogate satisfied the infants’ primary need for food. However, when Harlow made a loud noise to frighten the rhesus infants, they ran to the second, fluffy surrogate for comfort.

Maternal surrogates: A secure base from which to explore

In subsequent experiments, Harlow (1958) showed that the fluffy surrogate acted as a secure base from which rhesus infants could explore an unfamiliar environment or objects. In these experiments, the infants, along with their fluffy surrogates, were placed in an unfamiliar environment like a new cage.

These infants would explore the environment and return to the surrogate for comfort if startled. In contrast, when the infants were placed in the new environment without a surrogate, they would not explore but rather lie on the floor, paralyzed, rocking back and forth, sucking their thumbs.

The absence of a maternal surrogate

Harlow also studied the development of rhesus monkeys that were not exposed to a fluffy surrogate or had no surrogate at all. The outcome for these infants was extremely negative. Rhesus infants raised with a milk-supplying metal surrogate had softer feces than infants raised with a milk-supplying fluffy surrogate.

Harlow posited that the infants with the metal surrogates suffered from psychological disturbances, which manifested in digestive problems.

Rhesus infants raised with no surrogates showed the same fearful behavior when placed in an unfamiliar environment as described above, except that their behavior persisted even when a surrogate was placed in the environment with them. They also demonstrated less exploratory behavior and less curiosity than infants raised with surrogates from a younger age.

When these infants were approximately a year old, they were introduced to a surrogate. In response, they behaved fearfully and violently. They would rock continuously, scream, and attempt to escape their cages. Fortunately, these behaviors dissipated after a few days. The infants approached, explored, and clung to the surrogate, but never to the same extent as infants raised with a fluffy surrogate from a younger age.

Primary drives are ones that ensure a creature’s survival, such as the need for food or water. Harlow suggests that there is another drive, ‘contact comfort,’ which the fluffy surrogate satisfied.

The ‘contact comfort’ drive does more than just satisfy a need for love and comfort. From Harlow’s experiments, it seems that these fluffy surrogates offered a secure, comforting base from which infants felt confident enough to explore unfamiliar environments and objects, and to cope with scary sounds.

Conclusions from Harlow’s work were limited to the role of maternal surrogates because the surrogates also provided milk – a function that only female mammals can perform. Consequently, it was posited that human infants have a strong need to form an attachment to a maternal caregiver (Bowlby, 1951). However, subsequent research has shown that human infants do not only form an attachment with:

• a female caregiver,
• a caregiver that produces milk, or
• one caregiver (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964).

The bond between human infant and caregiver is not limited to only mothers, but can extend to anyone who spends time with the infant. Schaffer and Emerson (1964) studied the emotional responses of 60 infants to better understand their attachments and behaviors.

They found that at the start of the study, most of the infants had formed an attachment with a single person, normally the mother (71%), and that just over a third of the infants had formed attachments to multiple people, sometimes over five.

However, when the infants were 18 months, only 13% had an attachment to a single person, and most of the infants had two or more attachments. The other people with whom infants formed an attachment included:

• Grandparents
• Siblings and family members
• People who were not part of their family, including neighbors or other children

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Harlow’s experiment on rhesus monkeys shed light on the importance of the relationship between caregiver and infant. This relationship satisfies other needs besides food and thirst, and the behavior of rhesus infants differs depending on whether they were raised (1) with or without a surrogate and (2) whether that surrogate was a fluffy (i.e., comforting) or metal (i.e., non-comforting) one.

Widespread thinking at the time was that children only needed their physical needs to be satisfied in order to grow up into healthy, well-adjusted adults (Bowlby, 1951, 1958). Harlow’s work, however, suggests that the caregiver satisfies another need of the infant: the need for love.

It is difficult to know whether the infant monkeys truly loved the surrogate mothers because Harlow could not ask them directly or measure the feeling of love using equipment.

But there is no doubt that the presence (or absence) of a surrogate mother deeply affected the behavior of the infant monkeys, and monkeys with surrogate mothers displayed more normal behavior than those without.

Additionally, Harlow’s work also showed that infant monkeys looked for comfort in the fluffy surrogate mother, even if that surrogate mother never provided food.

From this research, we can conclude that infants feel an attachment toward their caregiver. That attachment is experienced as what we know to be ‘love.’ This attachment seems to be important for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Feeling safe when afraid or in an unfamiliar environment
• Responding in a loving, comforting way to the needs and feelings of infants

The infant’s need to form an attachment was not considered a primary need until 1952, when Bowlby argued that this basic need was one that infants feel instinctually (Bowlby & World Health Organization, 1952).

Bowlby’s work formed the basis of attachment theory – the theory that the relationship between infant and caregiver affects the infant’s psychological development.

The contributions from these researchers include:

• The emotional needs of infants are critical to healthy development and survival
• Parents play an important role besides merely satisfying the physical needs of an infant to ensure survival

Maternal deprivation

John Bowlby (1958) argued that maternal deprivation has extremely negative effects on the psychological and emotional development of children.

He was especially interested in extreme forms of parental deprivation, such as children who were homeless, abandoned, or institutionalized and therefore had no contact with their parents.

From his research, Bowlby argued that satisfying the physiological needs of the child did not ensure healthy development and that the effects of maternal deprivation were grave and difficult to reverse.

Specifically, he argued that how the caregiver behaves in response to the behavior and feelings of an infant plays an important role in infants’ psychological and emotional development (Bowlby, 1958).

Attachment styles in infants

How the caregiver responds to the infant is known as sensitive responsiveness (Ainsworth et al., 1978). The fluffy surrogate mothers in Harlow’s experiment were not responsive, obviously; however, their presence, the material used to cover them, and their shape allowed the rhesus infants to cling to them, providing comfort, albeit a basic, unresponsive one.

The findings from research by Harlow and Bowlby led to pioneering work by Mary Ainsworth on infant–mother attachments and attachment theory in infants. Specifically, she developed an alternative method to study child–parent attachments, using the ‘strange situation procedure’:

• The parent and child are placed together in an unfamiliar room.
• At some point, a (female) stranger enters the room, chats to the parent and plays with/chats to the infant.
• The parent leaves the room, and the child and stranger are alone together.
• The parent returns to the room, and the stranger leaves. The parent chats and plays with the child.
• The parent leaves the room, and the child is alone.
• The stranger returns and tries to chat and play with the child.

Depending on how the child behaved at the separation and introduction of the parent and the stranger, respectively, the attachment style between the infant and mother was classified as either secure, anxious-avoidant, or anxious-resistant.

For more reading on Mary Ainsworth, Harlow, and Bowlby, you can find out more about their work in our What is Attachment Theory? article.

Harlow’s studies on dependency in monkeys – Michael Baker

Subsequent research has questioned some of Harlow’s original findings and theories (Rutter, 1979). Some of these criticisms include:

• Harlow’s emphasis on the importance of a single, maternal figure in the child–parent relationship. As mentioned earlier, children can develop important relationships with different caregivers who do not need to be female/maternal figures (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964).
• The difference between a bond and an attachment. Children can form attachments without forming bonds. For example, a child might follow a teacher (i.e., an example of attachment behavior) and yet not have any deep bonds or relationships with other children. This suggests that these two types of relationships might be slightly different or governed by different processes.
• Other factors can also influence the relationship between child and parent, and their attachment. One such factor is the temperament of the parent or the child (Sroufe, 1985). For example, an anxious parent or child might show behavior that suggests an insecure attachment style.  Another factor is that behaviors that suggest attachment do not necessarily mean that the parent is better responding to the child’s needs. For example, children are more likely to follow a parent when in an unfamiliar environment. This behavior does not automatically imply that the child’s behavior is a result of the way the parent has responded in the past; instead, this is just how children behave.

One of Harlow’s most controversial claims was that peers were an adequate substitute for maternal figures. Specifically, he argued that monkeys that were raised with other similarly aged monkeys behaved the same as monkeys that were raised with their parents. In other words, the relationship with a parent is not unique, and peers can meet these ‘parental’ needs.

However, subsequent research showed that rhesus monkeys raised with peers were shyer, explored less, and occupied lower roles in monkey hierarchies (Suomi, 2008; Bastian, Sponberg, Suomi, & Higley, 2002).

Importantly, Harlow’s experiments are not evidence that there should be no separation between parent and infant. Such a scenario would be almost impossible in a normal environment today. Frequent separations between parent and infant are normal; however, it is critical that the infant can re-establish contact with the parent.

If contact is successfully re-established, then the bond between parent and child is reinforced.

Impact on psychological theories about human behavior

Harlow’s research on rhesus monkeys demonstrated the important role that parents have in our development and that humans have other salient needs that must be met to achieve happiness.

Harlow’s work added weight to the arguments put forward by Sigmund Freud (2003) that our relationship with our parents can affect our psychological development and behavior later in our lives.

Harlow’s work also influenced research on human needs. For example, Maslow (1943) argued that humans have a hierarchy of needs that must be met in order to experience life satisfaction  and happiness.

The first tier comprises physiological needs, such as hunger and thirst, followed by the second tier of needs such as having a secure place to live. The third tier describes feelings of love and belonging, such as having emotional bonds with other people. Maslow argued that self-actualization could only be reached when all of our needs were met.

Harlow continued to perform experiments on rhesus monkeys, including studying the effects of partial to complete social deprivation. It is highly unlikely that Harlow’s experiments would pass the rigorous requirements of any ethics committee today. The separation of an infant from their parent, especially intending to study the effect of this separation, would be considered cruel.

Kobak (2012) outlines the experiments performed by Harlow, and it is immediately obvious that many of these animals experienced severe emotional distress because of their living conditions.

In the partial isolation experiments, Harlow isolated a group of 56 monkeys from other monkeys; although they could hear and see the other monkeys, they were prevented from interacting with or touching them. These monkeys developed aggressive and severely disturbed behavior, such as staring into space, repetitive behaviors, and self-harm through chewing and tearing at their flesh.

Furthermore, the monkeys that were raised in isolation did not display normal mating behavior and failed in mating.

The complete social deprivation experiments were especially cruel. In these experiments, they raised the monkeys in a box, alone, with no sensory contact with other monkeys. They never saw, heard, or came into contact with any other monkeys.

The only contact that they had was with a human experimenter, but this was through a one-way screen and remote control; there was no visual input of another living creature.

Harlow described this experience as the ‘pit of despair.’ Monkeys raised in this condition for two years showed severely disturbed behavior, unable to interact with other monkeys, and efforts to reverse the effect of two years in isolation were unsuccessful.

Harlow considered this experiment as an analogy of what happens to children completely deprived of any social contact for the first few years of their lives.

The effects of Harlow’s experiments were not limited to only one generation of monkeys. In one of his studies, a set of rhesus monkeys raised with surrogates, rather than their own mothers, gave birth to their own infants.

Harlow observed that these parent-monkeys, which he termed ‘motherless monkeys,’ were dysfunctional parents. They either ignored their offspring or were extremely aggressive toward them. They raised two generations of monkeys to test the effect of parental deprivation.

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Harlow’s monkey experiments were cruel, but it would have been impossible to conduct the same experiments using human infants.

Furthermore, Harlow’s experiments helped shift attention to the important role that caregivers provide for children.

When Harlow was publishing his research, the medical fraternity believed that meeting the physical needs of children was enough to ensure a healthy child. In other words, if the child is fed, has water, and is kept warm and clean, then the child will develop into a healthy adult.

Harlow’s experiments showed that this advice was not true and that the emotional needs of infants are critical to healthy development.

With love, affection, and comfort, infants can develop into healthy adults.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free .

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation . Erlbaum.
• Bastian, M. L., Sponberg, A. C., Suomi, S. J., & Higley, J. D. (2002). Long-term effects of infant rearing condition on the acquisition of dominance rank in juvenile and adult rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Developmental Psychobiology , 42 , 44–51.
• Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health . Columbia University Press.
• Bowlby, J. (1958). The nature of the child’s tie to his mother. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 39 , 350–373.
• Bowlby, J., & World Health Organization. (1952). Maternal care and mental health: A report prepared on behalf of the World Health Organization as a contribution to the United Nations programme for the welfare of homeless children . World Health Organization.
• Colman, M. A. (2001). Oxford dictionary of psychology . Oxford University Press.
• Freud, S. (2003). An outline of psychoanalysis . Penguin UK.
• Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist , 13 (12), 673.
• Kobak, R. (2012). Attachment and early social deprivation: Revisiting Harlow’s monkey studies. Developmental psychology: Revisiting the classic studies , S , 10–23.
• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review , 50 (4), 370–96.
• Rutter, M. (1979). Maternal deprivation, 1972–1978: New findings, new concepts, new approaches. Child Development , 50 (2), 283–305.
• Schaffer, H. R., & Emerson, P. E. (1964). The development of social attachments in infancy. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 29 (3), 1–77.
• Sroufe, L. A. (1985). Attachment classification from the perspective of infant-caregiver relationships and infant temperament. Child Development , 56 (1), 1–14.
• Suomi, S. J. (2008). Attachment in rhesus monkeys. In J. Cassidy & P. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research and clinical applications (pp. 173–191). Guilford Press.

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Parental attunement and attention also shape the architecture of the brain and the function of the nervous system. When a child does not encounter sufficient parental attunement, compassion, kindness, and empathy, they are deprived of experiences that foster the integration of the brain. This results in a dysregulated nervous system, which cannot produce regulated emotions, thoughts, behaviors, relationships, or bodily systems. The impeded integration causes internal distress, the symptoms of which include chronic illness, recurrent pain, poor relationships, and “mental health” conditions (which are health conditions).

The child (and subsequently insufficiently supported adult) tries to find relief through whatever means are available: numbing, acting out, withdrawing, overeating, substance abuse, dissociation, splitting, self-harm, etc. These are not “disorders” but *survival adaptations* demanded by the unsafe environment. The child/adult uses whatever survival adaptations are available; when they have better options, they use them.

When the dysregulated person receives sufficient psychosocial support, such as through truly therapeutic or other integrative relationships, the brain can integrate and the nervous system can regulate. People, like animals and plants, flourish in supportive environments. Fix the environment and the symptoms fade.

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Harlow’s Monkey Experiment – The Bond between Babies and Mothers

Harry Harlow was an American psychologist whose studies were focused on the effects of maternal separation, dependency, and social isolation on both mental and social development.

Objective of the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment

The idea came to Harlow when he was developing the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus or the WGTA to study the mental processes of primates, which include memory, cognition and learning. As he developed his tests, he realized that the monkeys he worked with were slowly learning how to develop strategies around his tests.

Harlow had the idea that infant monkeys who are separated from their mothers at a very early age (within 90 days) can easily cope with a surrogate, because the bond with the biological mother has not yet been established. Furthermore, he also wanted to learn whether the bond is established because of pure nourishment of needs (milk), or if it involves other factors.

How did the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment work?

Results of the harlow monkey experiment.

Furthermore, the results of the second experiment showed that while the baby monkeys in both groups consumed the same amount of milk from their “mother”, the babies who grew up with the terry cloth mother exhibited emotional attachment and what is considered as normal behaviour when presented with stressful variables. Whenever they felt threatened, they would stay close to the terry cloth mother and cuddle with it until they were calm.

Significance of the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment

Moreover, it was found that the establishment of bond between baby and mother is not purely dependent on the satisfaction of one’s physiological needs (warmth, safety, food) , but also emotional (acceptance, love, affection).

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Harlow’s Monkey Experiment (Definition + Contribution to Psychology)

Not all experiments in psychology involve humans; nevertheless, those utilizing animals often aim to shed light on human behavior. Harlow's Monkey experiments had a significant impact on psychology, and despite being considered controversial, they remain influential to this day.

What Are Harlow’s Monkey Experiments?

Harlow's Monkey experiments looked at the influence of parental guidance and interaction during early development. Infant monkeys were placed in isolation, away from their mothers. In other experiments, he took infant monkeys away from their mothers but placed them in a cage with “surrogate” mothers.

In both sets of experiments, he found that the monkeys displayed a specific set of behaviors as a response to their unusual upbringing.

Psychology Before Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Harry Harlow, the man behind the monkey experiments, was a psychologist in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, some conflicting ideas were going around about parenting styles.

Early behaviorists didn’t think parents should be so cuddly. Watson told parents that lots of physical affection would slow down their development.

For years, psychology students were taught that B.F. Skinner’s daughter was subject to the behaviorist’s experiments, and she went crazy after being isolated in a glass box for the first year of her life. Skinner said that she was raised just fine in isolation. (Skinner’s daughter refutes some rumors in a Guardian article .)

As time went on, psychoanalysts like Freud theorized that a child’s development was stunted if the mother didn’t provide love and attention in the first year of the child’s life. If a child experienced trauma during this year, they would develop an oral fixation. After all, getting fed was the most important experience in the first year of a child’s life.

There were a lot of different ideas on how to raise a child. And it makes sense that most parents wanted to do the “right” thing.

So psychologists started to build experiments to test some of these theories. Harry Harlow was one of them. But rather than studying children, he studied rhesus monkeys. His experiments were very different from a lot of psychologists at the time. He wanted to focus on the impact of love and basic physiological needs.

What Happened During Harlow's Monkey Experiments?

The monkeys in isolation were separated from other monkeys for 3-12 months. During that time, some would display behaviors to possibly “self-soothe.” Others would self-mutilate. They would circle anxiously and appear to be distressed.

Harlow also studied what happened when these monkeys were placed back in the company of other monkeys. The results were slightly disturbing. They continued to self-mutilate. They couldn’t integrate themselves into society. These isolated monkeys were scared, aggressive, or dumbfounded. Some of the monkeys died after they stopped eating.

Harlow noted that the longer the monkeys stayed in isolation, the harder it was for them to integrate into society.

Monkeys With Wire or Cloth Mothers

So the monkeys were negatively affected by isolation. But Harlow wanted to go further. Why were the monkeys impacted so significantly? Was it solely because of physiological factors, or did love and affection play a role?

To answer these questions, Harlow set up another experiment. He took the infant monkeys away from their mothers and placed them in a cage with two “surrogate” mothers. One of these surrogate mothers was made out of wire. The other was made out of cloth.

In some cages, the wire mother had food for the monkeys. The cloth mother did not. In other cases, the cloth mother had food for the monkeys. The wire mother did not.

Harlow observed that no matter which surrogate mother held the food, the infants would spend more time with the comforting cloth mother. If only the wire mother had food, the monkeys would only go to them when hungry. Otherwise, they would stay in the comfort of the cloth mother.

This doesn’t mean that the monkeys were fully developed socially. When these monkeys were placed back into cages with other monkeys, they didn’t integrate well. They were shy, didn’t stand up for themselves if bullied, and had trouble mating. The monkeys that did become mothers also had trouble raising their monkeys. Harlow believed these behaviors resulted from the events in their infancy.

Attachment Theory and Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Suppose you have ever read anything from relationship experts or counselors. In that case, you might hear this idea: our relationship with our parents influences the partners we pick and the way we go about relationships. Many psychologists have shared variations of this idea. Some of these variations are cringe-worthy, and some are quite helpful.

One variation of this idea is Attachment Theory . This theory describes four different types of attachments that we develop based on our relationship with our parents. We bring this attachment style (secure, anxious, etc.) into adult relationships.

Attachment Theory was the product of studies conducted by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. However, their studies are not the only ones influencing how we view attachment formation. One set of experiments, Harlow’s Monkey experiments, played a role in influencing how we view attachment. Due to the unethical nature of this experiment, it’s not always discussed in a psychology class or discussions about relationships.

Controversy and Other Studies on Attachment

If you think, “Those poor monkeys!” you’re not alone. Many people believed that Harlow’s experiments were unethical. Why would you subject live animals to an experiment that would ultimately traumatize them? Remember, some of these monkeys died early due to starvation caused by anxious behaviors. Did those monkeys need to die for the good of science?

While some say yes, others say no. Not all studies on attachment took such harsh measures. For example, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth observed parents and children as parents left the room for a few minutes at a time. You can learn more about these studies, and the Attachment Styles developed as a result of these studies in another video.

Despite the controversy surrounding his experiments, Harlow did positively impact the world of psychology and parenting. The risks he took for studying love and care, when those topics weren’t discussed in psychology, paid off. His work showed the importance of love and affection. Caregivers, parents, and guardians took note. If your parents or grandparents showed you love and affection as a child, you can thank the research of Harry Harlow and other psychologists who studied Attachment and development.

Related posts:

• Dreams Of Monkeys Meaning (12 Reasons + Interpretation)
• Attachment Styles Theory (Free Test)
• John Bowlby Biography - Contributions To Psychology
• Mary Ainsworth (Biography)
• Golden Child Syndrome (Definition + Examples)

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Inside The Controversial Story Of Harry Harlow, The Psychologist Who Studied Maternal Love By Experimenting On Monkeys

In the mid-20th century, harry harlow conducted cruel experiments on baby rhesus monkeys to prove that the bond between mother and child went far beyond the need for food..

University of Wisconsin-Madison Harry Harlow with one of the rhesus monkeys and its surrogate cloth “mother.”

Harry Harlow was fascinated with the idea of love. Specifically, he wanted to explore how infants develop loving connections with their families. And he did so with a number of controversial experiments involving baby rhesus monkeys and surrogate “mothers” made of cloth or wire.

At the time, most scientists believed that infants were motivated to form connections with their mothers out of a need for food. Some psychologists even counseled that parents should not comfort or hold their children too much because it would make them become dependent adults.

But Harlow’s experiments revealed the opposite — when given a choice between a “wire” mother with milk, and a “cloth” mother without any food, the baby monkeys chose to cling to the cloth mother. What’s more, Harlow showed that babies living in isolation failed to develop social skills.

Harlow’s experiments were controversial and cruel, but they demonstrated an important truth about the infants’ need for touch, love, and comfort.

How Harry Israel Became Harry Harlow

Born on Oct. 31, 1905, as Harry Israel, Harlow grew up in Fairfield, Iowa, with his parents and three brothers. According to his biographer, Deborah Blum, who wrote Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection , Harlow was a bright, if bored child, whose lonely early years were largely defined by an illness suffered by his brother, Delmer.

“I have no memory of partial maternal separation, but I may have lost some percentage of maternal affection,” Harlow later wrote of Delmer’s illness, according to Blum. “[T]his deprivation may have resulted in consuming adolescent and adult loneliness.”

A capable student when he put his mind to it, Harlow finished 13th out of his class of 71 and outscored all his classmates in an aptitude test designed by the University of Iowa. Yet he had little ambition beyond being “famous,” according to his yearbook — and secretly feared he’d end up “insane.”

Instead, Harry Harlow ended up at Stanford University in California in 1924. After struggling as an English major, he switched to psychology and spent six years as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, studying under great minds like Lewis Terman, the developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

In fact, it was Terman who suggested Harlow change his name from “Israel” to avoid the suggestion that he was Jewish. “Terman chose Harlow for me,” Harlow later wrote, “and as far as I know, I am the only scientists who has ever been named by his major professor.”

After graduating in 1930, Harry Harlow found a faculty job at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And, there, he would develop his famous — and controversial — experiment with baby rhesus monkeys.

The Wire Vs. Cotton Mother Experiments

Harry Harlow/Public Domain A baby rhesus monkey curls at the feet of its “cloth” mother, ignoring its “wire” mother.

For more than 20 years, Harry Harlow toiled at the University of Wisconsin in relative obscurity. But in 1957, he began an experiment with baby rhesus monkeys that would make him famous — and infamous.

According to The New York Times , most scientists at the time agreed that babies’ connections with their mothers was based on food. As such, many prominent psychologists advised parents not to cuddle their children or respond to their cries because it would make them overly dependent.

“When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” the behaviorist John B. Watson even said.

But Harry Harlow and others, according to the Association for Psychological Science , questioned this logic. To explore the question further, Harlow began a series of experiments with infant rhesus monkeys in his Wisconsin lab.

First, Harlow conducted an experiment in which he raised some infant monkeys in complete isolation. According to the Association for Psychological Science, the isolated monkeys hurt themselves, paced in their cages, and stared blankly. When introduced to others, they didn’t know how to interact — and some stopped eating and died.

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images A rhesus monkey in the wild holding its baby, contact which Harlow established is important.

Significantly, they also clung nervously to their cloth diapers, which led Harlow to develop the next phase of his study. In this experiment, Harlow took baby monkeys and placed them with two surrogate “mothers,” one made of wire, and one made of a soft cloth.

Sometimes, the wire mother had a milk bottle, and sometimes the cloth mother did. But no matter what, Harlow found that the baby monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother. When the wire mother had milk, the babies approached it to feed, then returned to the cloth mother. According to PBS , when the cloth mother had milk, the babies ignored the wire mother.

What’s more, the mere presence of a surrogate mother gave the babies more confidence. When placed in a new environment with the surrogate, the monkey would explore. When placed without the surrogate, the monkey would cower in fear, scream, and cry.

Harlow also tested how having a peer group might affect baby monkeys. He found that monkeys that grew up with peers and a mother interacted easily with others. Monkeys with cloth mothers did too — but it took more time. However, monkeys with a mother but no peers were fearful and aggressive, and monkeys with neither had no social skills at all.

So, what exactly did Harry Harlow’s experiments establish?

Harry Harlow’s Legacy Today

In his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys, Harry Harlow disproved the scientists of his day who believed that physical contact was unimportant and that babies connect with their mothers out of a desire to survive. Instead, he established the concept of “contact comfort.”

With enough contact comfort, Harlow’s experiments suggested, human infants would grow up to be well-adjusted members of society. Without it, they would be fearful, aggressive, and socially inept.

Ironically, Harlow often struggled to develop stable relationships in his own life. He had two failed marriages (though he remarried his first wife after his second wife died) and, according to Very Well Mind , could be “sarcastic, mean-spirited, misanthropic, chauvinistic, and cruel.”

Plus, his experiments are seen today by some as highly controversial and unethical. By removing the baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, often placing them in isolation, Harlow inflicted deep, psychological pain on his subjects. But Harry Harlow likely saw his work as essential in order to better understand one of life’s most powerful emotions.

“Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding,” he said when he presented his work at the 66th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in August 1958. Arguing that love was “a motive which pervades our entire lives,” Harlow added:

“Because of its intimate and personal nature, it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables.”

His experiments with rhesus monkeys were controversial. But they also compellingly showed how love — or its absence — can shape our lives.

After reading about Harry Harlow and his experiments with rhesus monkeys, learn about the Jim twins who were separated at birth but lived uncannily similar lives. Or, go inside the study that suggested that monkeys are better problem-solvers than humans.

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Harry Harlow with the mother surrogates he used to raise infant monkeys. The terry cloth mother is pictured above. The bare wire mother appears below. Given a choice, infant monkeys invariably preferred surrogate mothers covered with soft terry cloth, and they spent a great deal of time cuddling with them (above), just as they would have with their real mothers (below).   The famous experiments that psychologist Harry Harlow conducted in the 1950s on maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys were landmarks not only in primatology, but in the evolving science of attachment and loss. Harlow himself repeatedly compared his experimental subjects to children and press reports universally treated his findings as major statements about love and development in human beings. These monkey love experiments had powerful implications for any and all separations of mothers and infants, including adoption, as well as childrearing in general. In his University of Wisconsin laboratory, Harlow probed the nature of love, aiming to illuminate its first causes and mechanisms in the relationships formed between infants and mothers. First, he showed that mother love was emotional rather than physiological, substantiating the adoption-friendly theory that continuity of care—“nurture”—was a far more determining factor in healthy psychological development than “nature.” Second, he showed that capacity for attachment was closely associated with critical periods in early life, after which it was difficult or impossible to compensate for the loss of initial emotional security. The critical period thesis confirmed the wisdom of placing infants with adoptive parents as shortly after birth as possible. Harlow’s work provided experimental evidence for prioritizing psychological over biological parenthood while underlining the developmental risks of adopting children beyond infancy. It normalized and pathologized adoption at the same time. How did Harlow go about constructing his science of love? He separated infant monkeys from their mothers a few hours after birth, then arranged for the young animals to be “raised” by two kinds of surrogate monkey mother machines, both equipped to dispense milk. One mother was made out of bare wire mesh. The other was a wire mother covered with soft terry cloth. Harlow’s first observation was that monkeys who had a choice of mothers spent far more time clinging to the terry cloth surrogates, even when their physical nourishment came from bottles mounted on the bare wire mothers. This suggested that infant love was no simple response to the satisfaction of physiological needs. Attachment was not primarily about hunger or thirst. It could not be reduced to nursing. Then Harlow modified his experiment and made a second important observation. When he separated the infants into two groups and gave them no choice between the two types of mothers, all the monkeys drank equal amounts and grew physically at the same rate. But the similarities ended there. Monkeys who had soft, tactile contact with their terry cloth mothers behaved quite differently than monkeys whose mothers were made out of cold, hard wire. Harlow hypothesized that members of the first group benefitted from a psychological resource—emotional attachment—unavailable to members of the second. By providing reassurance and security to infants, cuddling kept normal development on track. What exactly did Harlow see that convinced him emotional attachment made a decisive developmental difference? When the experimental subjects were frightened by strange, loud objects, such as teddy bears beating drums, monkeys raised by terry cloth surrogates made bodily contact with their mothers, rubbed against them, and eventually calmed down. Harlow theorized that they used their mothers as a “psychological base of operations,” allowing them to remain playful and inquisitive after the initial fright had subsided. In contrast, monkeys raised by wire mesh surrogates did not retreat to their mothers when scared. Instead, they threw themselves on the floor, clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, and screamed in terror. These activities closely resembled the behaviors of autistic and deprived children frequently observed in institutions as well as the pathological behavior of adults confined to mental institutions, Harlow noted. The awesome power of attachment and loss over mental health and illness could hardly have been performed more dramatically. In subsequent experiments, Harlow’s monkeys proved that “better late than never” was not a slogan applicable to attachment. When Harlow placed his subjects in total isolation for the first eights months of life, denying them contact with other infants or with either type of surrogate mother, they were permanently damaged. Harlow and his colleagues repeated these experiments, subjecting infant monkeys to varied periods of motherlessness. They concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it had lasted less than 90 days, and estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred. emotional bonds were first established was the key to they could be established at all. For experimentalists like Harlow, only developmental theories verified under controlled laboratory conditions deserved to be called scientific. Harlow was no . He criticized psychoanalysis for speculating on the basis of faulty memories, assuming that adult disorders necessarily originated in childhood experiences, and interpreting too literally the significance of breast-feeding. Yet Harlow’s data confirmed the well known psychoanalytic emphasis on the mother-child relationship at the dawn of life, and his research reflected the repudiation of and the triumph of therapeutic approaches already well underway throughout the human sciences and clinical professions by midcentury. Along with child analysts and researchers, including and René Spitz, Harry Harlow’s experiments added scientific legitimacy to two powerful arguments: against institutional child care and in favor of psychological parenthood. Both suggested that the permanence associated with adoption was far superior to other arrangements when it came to safeguarding the future mental and emotional well-being of children in need of parents. of this page by Boris Kozlow] | | | | | | | Site designed by:   Department of History, University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon 97403-1288 (541) 346-3699 E-mail: © Ellen Herman The Science of Affection: How a Rebel Researcher Pioneered the Study of Love in the 1950s and Illuminated How Parents Shape Children’s Emotional Patterns By maria popova. “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” psychologists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon observed in their indispensable A General Theory of Love . “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn wrote . But although love has been a fixture of philosophy, ethics, and the world’s great spiritual traditions since the dawn of recorded thought, it has earned its place as a subject of science only recently, and chiefly thanks to one man — primate researcher Harry Harlow (October 31, 1905–December 6, 1981), who defied the scientific dogma of his day to unravel the psychological armature of affection, how our formative attachments shape who we become, and why love is the most primary need to be met for healthy development. In the immeasurably captivating Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection ( public library ), Pulitzer-winning writer Deborah Blum chronicles the trailblazing work and far-reaching legacy of this “chainsmoking, poetry-writing, alcoholic, impossible genius of a psychologist” — a “stubborn, scruffy, middle-aged researcher … who happens to believe that his profession is wrong and doesn’t mind saying so,” a man who “lives at the lab, dawn to dark, fueled by coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and obsession.” Harlow’s point of obsession and insurgency was the conviction, boldly defiant of the era’s scientific dogma, that love matters — that it is a centerpiece of our psychoemotional constitution and, as such, merits being systematically studied rather than dismissed as an irrelevant and unscientific whim. Indeed, the book is as much a biography of Harlow himself as it is of this astonishingly nascent idea, which was scientific anathema in Harlow’s heyday but has steered the course of social science and permeated popular culture in the half-century since. Harlow used the 120 rhesus monkeys in his lab to study mother-infant attachment and how the effects of maternal separation and social isolation illuminate the nature of love. His most famous experiment devised two versions of an artificial surrogate mother for the baby monkeys — one made entirely of wire and the other, designed to be cozy and cuddly, of wire and cloth; both were internally heated to simulate the warmth of a real mother’s body. The empirical hook was that the wire-only mother held a bottle of milk, which the babies could feed on, whereas the cuddly mother offered nothing but the creaturely comfort of warmth and soft touch. Upending decades, if not centuries, of prior theories predicated on a kind of survivalist evolutionary pragmatism, Harlow found that the baby monkeys consistently chose the cuddly mother over the feeding but cold mother. They lived latched onto the cloth mother and leaned over to the wire one nearby to take a sip of milk only when they grew hungry, but even as they did this, they remained completely attached — both literally and figuratively — to the cuddly robot. Over and over, the monkeys demonstrated that the safe embrace of comfort is more vital to their development than the steady but cold supply of sustenance. Harlow’s findings were as profound as they are disquieting, particularly to those of us who are the product of far from perfect parenting. Recounting his central assertion — which he made on national television, further defying the norms of his profession — Blum writes: We begin our lives with love [and] we learn human connection at home. It is the foundation upon which we build our lives — or it should be — and if the monkey or the human doesn’t learn love in infancy, he or she “may never learn to love at all.” “If monkeys have taught us anything,” Harlow asserted in reflecting on his experiments, “it’s that you’ve got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.” Today, his findings are revered by developmental psychologists, his methods reviled by animal rights advocates in light of our radically different norms of primate research, and his legacy as enormous and messy as the subject of his study. To appreciate just how radical a departure from the status quo of science Harlow’s theories were, we must turn to language — for, as the poet Elizabeth Alexander memorably observed, “we live in the word.” Harlow’s work was his life, and he refused to live in limiting language defined by dogma. Blum captures his irreverent genius: Professor Harlow has already been asked to correct his language: He’s been instructed on the correct term for a close relationship. Why can’t he just say “proximity” like everyone else? Somehow the word “love” just keeps springing to his lips when he talks about parents and children, friends and partners. He’s been known to lose his temper when discussing it. “Perhaps all you’ve known in life is proximity,” he once snapped at a visitor to his lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “I thank God I’ve known more.” […] Who wouldn’t believe that love was, at its best, a safe harbor — a parent’s arm scooping up a frightened child, holding it heart to heart? It’s hard to believe, in retrospect, how many powerful scientists opposed this idea. Blum points to one researcher emblematic of the era — psychologist John B. Watson, president of the American Psychological Association, who believed that emotion was a moral weakness to be controlled and considered love, the most intense and messiest of the emotions, a supreme offender the corrupting effects of which should be restrained as early as possible. In a particularly spirited passage, he admonished: When you are tempted to pet your child remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument… Once a child’s character has been spoiled by bad handling, which can be done in a few days, who can say that the damage is ever repaired? In the midst of this professional climate, Harlow chose “to stand on behalf of that improbable, unreliable, elusive emotion called love” and helmed a quiet, monumental revolution. It’s astonishing to consider that getting science to heed a truth this elemental and intuitive — that love is central to our experience of being human — should necessitate nothing short of a revolution, and yet it very much did. Like any revolution, it required the collusion of kindred spirits working together against an enormous tide of pushback. Among those confederates was the English psychologist John Bowlby, who pioneered attachment theory and the idea that the fulfillment of physical needs like sustenance and shelter is a secondary drive in the parent-child relationship — love is the primary one. Blum explains: What attachment theory essentially says is that being loved matters — and, more than that, it matters who loves us and whom we love in return. It’s not just a matter of the warm body holding the bottle; it’s not object love at all; we love specific people and we need them to love us back. And in the case of the child’s tie to the mother, it matters that the mother loves that baby and that the baby knows it. When you are a very small child, love needs to be as tangible as warm arms around you and as audible as the lull of a gentle voice at night. Bowlby’s work was instrumental, but there was one other essential building block in the architecture of Harlow’s quiet revolution — the work of a New York physician named William Goldfarb, who made the unnerving discovery that parental affection exerts a strong influence on the child’s IQ. Preoccupied with the fate of children in New York’s Jewish orphanages and foundling homes, Goldfarb had grown concerned that social isolation was damaging their intellectual development. To test his theory, he measured their performance on IQ tests and compared it to that of children in foster homes. Foundling children were often the result of unwanted pregnancies by educated women of high social class, whereas foster kids came from less credentialed backgrounds and ended up with their new parents after the displacement or death of their biological parents. Since existing theories held that genes were the greatest predictor of intelligence, it was expected that the foundlings would perform better than the foster kids on IQ tests. But Goldfarb found the opposite. Love and intelligence, it turned out, were far more strongly correlated than genetics and intelligence. Blum writes: The foundlings were less determined, less interested, less willing to explore… One problem was that no one was interested in them, [Goldfarb] said. The caretakers seemed indifferent. But was that surprising? Goldfarb asked. Is an adult ever interested in a child who doesn’t stir his heart? An odd kind of chicken or egg issue underlies that query. Does affection for another person create interest in him or does interest lead to affection? When it came to the foundlings, Goldfarb had an idea that interest and affection twined together, tight as a rope, almost inseparably. All of us, even as babies, are a bundle of feelings and desires, he said. Our positive emotions grow best in an interactive sense, fostered by how we react to others and how they respond to us. A baby, a child, even an adult, needs at least one person interested and responsive. We grow best in soil cultivated by someone who thinks we matter. This brings us back to Harlow. Building on these compelling but fragmentary insights, he advanced a robust and holistic theory of how profoundly our formative interactions and attachments shape our destiny, and then he set out to derive definitive evidence. To prove the importance of parental affection, he would demonstrate the effects of its absence and, even more dramatically, of its opposite. Blum chronicles the clever, if cruel, twist Harlow put on his wire-mother experiments: The lab team built what Harry called evil or “monster” mothers. There were four of them and they were cloth moms gone crazy. All of them had a soft-centered body for cuddling. But they were, all of them, booby traps. One was a “shaking” mother who rocked so violently that, Harry said, the teeth and bones of the infant chattered in unison. The second was an air-blast mother. She blew compressed air against the infant with such force that the baby looked, Harry said, as if it would be denuded. The third had an embedded steel frame that, on schedule or demand, would fling forward and hurl the infant monkey off the mother’s body. The fourth monster mother had brass spikes (blunt-tipped) tucked into her chest; these would suddenly, unexpectedly push against the clinging child. What Harlow found was both heartbreaking and heartbreakingly understandable — rather than fleeing from the monstrous mothers, the babies tried harder to earn their affection. After every violent repulsion, they returned to the monsters, only to cling more tightly and coo more beseechingly, “expressing faith and love as if all were forgiven,” as Harlow put it. Blum encapsulates the profound implications, revealing love to be a kind of primal addiction: No experiment could have better demonstrated the depth and strength of a baby’s addiction for her parent. Or how terrifyingly vulnerable that addiction makes a child. These little monkeys would be frightened away by brass spike mom — and yet it was she they turned to for comfort. They had to; she was what they had. Here indeed was further evidence of that haven-of-security effect, for better and for worse. It doesn’t always keep you safe. If your mother is your only source of comfort and your mother is evil, what choices are left you in seeking safe harbor? No choice except to keep trying to cast anchor in the only harbor available. Harry and his team would find the same pattern when real mother monkeys were rejecting or abusive. The scientists marveled at “the desperate efforts the babies made to contact their mothers. No matter how abusive the mothers were, the babies persisted in returning.” They returned more often, they reached and clung and coaxed far more frequently than the children of normal mothers. The infants were so preoccupied with engaging their mothers that they had little energy for friends. The clinging babies’ energy was directed into their attempts to coax a little affection out at home. Sometimes the real monkey mothers did respond, gradually, more kindly. But while trying to reach mother, the little monkeys never had time to reach anyone else. Harlow’s findings ushered in a tidal wave of change in psychology and instituted love as a proper and central subject in the study of human development. Generations of psychologists built on his work, including many of Harlow’s own students. Among them was Steve Suomi, director of the National Institutes of Health lab of comparative ethology, who became interested in the interplay of nature and nurture in emotional development. In one ingenious experiment, he divided a sample of baby monkeys into two groups. Some remained with their biological mothers, who were selected to be unaffectionate and inattentive, while others were raised by what Suomi called “supermoms” — caretakers selected for their exceedingly affectionate nurturing style. Both groups of mothers cared for a variety of babies, including some naturally anxious and nervous ones. Suomi found that the baby monkeys developed optimally under the care of the most loving mother, regardless of their biological connection. The effects were most dramatic on the nervous babies — with an unwaveringly affectionate mother, they grew calmer and became nurturers themselves, but with a neurotic mother, they grew even more nervous, fearful, and anxious to explore their environment. There are several reminders in that elegant NIH experiment: that we need not grow up to be our mothers; that we may not want to; that it’s not easy to change. And that it may be unfair to load all our expectations and needs onto one parent, anyway. With the best intentions in the world, one person may not be able — or intended — to give a child everything he or she needs. The extended family, even the right child care provider may be exactly what’s needed. As it turns out, this is true not only of parent-child relationships but of all intimate attachments — Esther Perel has written elegantly about the comparable perils of placing all of one’s expectations on one’s romantic partner. But since we seek out romantic partners largely on the basis of emotional patterning laid out in childhood , even this can be traced to Harlow’s legacy. Blum encapsulates the heart of his work and its enduring implications: There is no requirement for angelic perfection in parenting. The requirement is just to stay in there. Harry’s research tells us that love is work. So do all the studies that follow. The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give. Be a mother who listens, a father who cuddles, a friend who calls back, a helping neighbor, a loving child. That emphasis on love in our everyday lives may be the best of that quiet revolution in psychology, the one that changed the way we think about love and relationship almost without our noticing that had happened. We take for granted now that parents should hug their children, that relationships are worth the time, that taking care of each other is part of the good life. It is such a good foundation that it’s almost astonishing to consider how recent it is. For that foundation under our feet we owe a debt to Harry Harlow and to all the scientists who believed and worked toward a psychology of the heart. At the end, in Harry’s handiwork, there’s nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it’s a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships. Or, as Harry Harlow wrote to a friend, “Perhaps one should always be modest when talking about love.” Love at Goon Park is a tremendously pleasurable and revelatory read in its totality. Complement it with young Barack Obama on what his mother taught him about love , Iris Murdoch on how love gives meaning to human existence , and Erich Fromm on what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving . — Published July 7, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/07/love-at-goon-park-harry-harlow-deborah-blum/ — www.themarginalian.org PRINT ARTICLE Email article, filed under, books culture deborah blum harry harlow love parenting psychology science, view full site. The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.) svg]:stroke-accent-900"> These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they’re too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys. By Eleanor Cummins Posted on Jun 22, 2018 7:00 PM EDT 8 minute read John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child, he’d decided, produced effects too cruel to inflict on monkeys. Since the 1990s, Gluck’s focus has been on bioethics; he’s written research papers and even a book about the ramifications of conducting research on primates. Along the way, he has argued that continued lab experiments testing the effects of separation on monkeys are unethical. Many of his peers, from biology to psychology, agree. And while the rationale for discontinuing such testing has many factors, one reason stands out. The fundamental questions we had about parent-child separation, Gluck says, were answered long ago. The first insights into attachment theory began with studious observations on the part of clinicians. Starting in the 1910s and peaking in the 1930s, doctors and psychologists actively advised parents against hugging , kissing, or cuddling children on the assumption such fawning attention would condition children to behave in a manner that was weak, codependent, and unbecoming. This theory of “behaviorism” was derived from research like Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning research on dogs and the work of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner , who believed free will to be an illusion. Applied in the context of the family unit, this research seemed to suggest that forceful detachment on the part of ma and pa were essential ingredients in creating a strong, independent future adult. Parents were simply there to provide structure and essentials like food. But after the end of World War II, doctors began to push back. In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock (no relation to Dr. Spock of Star Trek ) authored Baby and Child Care, the international bestseller, which sold 50 million copies in Spock’s lifetime. The book, which was based on his professional observation of parent-child relationships, advised against the behaviorist theories of the day. Instead, Spock implored parents to see their children as individuals in need of customized care—and plenty of physical affection. At the same time, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby was commissioned to write the World Health Organization’s Maternal Care and Mental Health report. Bowlby had gained renowned before the war for his systematic study of the effects of institutionalization on children, from long-term hospital stays to childhoods confined to orphanages. Published in 1951, Bowlby’s lengthy two-part document focused on the mental health of homeless children. In it, he brought together anecdotal reports and descriptive statistics to paint a portrait of the disastrous effects of the separation of children from their caretakers and the consequences of “deprivation” on both the body and mind. “Partial deprivation brings in its train acute anxiety, excessive need for love, powerful feelings of revenge, and, arising from these last, guilt and depression,” Bowlby wrote. Like Spock, this research countered behaviorist theories that structure and sustenance were all a child needed. Orphans were certainly fed, but in most cases they lacked love. The consequences, Bowlby argued, were dire—and long-lasting. The evidence of the near-sanctity of parent-child attachment was growing thanks to the careful observation of experts like Spock and Bowlby. Still, many experts felt one crucial piece of evidence was missing: experimental data. Since the Enlightenment, scientists have worked to refine their methodology in the hopes of producing the most robust observations about the natural world. In the late 1800s, randomized, controlled trials were developed and in the 20th century came to be seen as the “gold standard” for research —a conviction that more or less continues to this day. While Bowlby had clinically-derived data, he knew to advance his ideas in the wider world he would need data from a lab . But by 1947, the scientific establishment required informed consent for research participants (though notable cases like the Tuskegee syphilis study violated such rules into at least the 1970s). As a result, no one would condone forcibly separating parents and children for research purposes. Fortunately, Bowlby’s transatlantic correspondent, Harry Harlow, had another idea. Over the course of his career, Harlow conducted countless studies of primate behavior and published more than 300 research papers and books. Unsurprisingly, in a 2002 ranking the impact of 20th century psychologists , the American Psychological Association named him the 26th most cited researcher of the era, below B.F. Skinner (1), but above Noam Chomsky (38). But the (ethically-fraught) experiments that cemented his status in Psychology 101 textbooks for good began in earnest only in the 1950s. Around the time Bowlby published WHO report, Harlow began to push the psychological limits of monkeys in myriad ways—all in the name of science. He surgically altered their brains or beamed radiation through their skulls to cause lesions, and then watched the neurological effect, according to a 1997 paper by Gluck that spans history, biography, and ethics. He forced some animals to live in a “deep, wedge-shaped, stainless steel chambers… graphically called the ‘pit of despair'” in order to study the effect of such solitary confinement on the mind, Gluck wrote. But Harlow’s most well-known study, begun in the 1950s and carefully documented in pictures and videos made available to the public, centered around milk. To test the truth of the behaviorist’s claims that things like food mattered more than affection, Harlow set up an experiment that allowed baby monkeys, forcibly separated from their mothers at birth, to choose between two fake surrogates. One known as the “iron maiden” was made only of wire, but had bottles full of milk protruding from its metal chest. The other was covered in a soft cloth, but entirely devoid of food. If behaviorists were right, babies should choose the surrogate who offered them food over the surrogate who offered them nothing but comfort. As Spock or Bowlby may have predicted, this was far from the case. “Results demonstrated that the monkeys overwhelmingly preferred to maintain physical contact with the soft mothers,” Gluck wrote. “It also was shown that the monkeys seemed to derive a form of emotional security by the very presence of the soft surrogate that lasted for years, and they ‘screamed their distress’ in ‘abject terror’ when the surrogate mothers were removed from them.” They visited the iron maiden when they were too hungry to avoid her metallic frame any longer. As anyone in behavioral psychology will tell you, Harlow’s monkey studies are still considered foundational for the field of parent-child research to this day. But his work is not without controversy. In fact, it never has been. Even when Harlow was conducting his research, some of his peers criticized the experiments , which they considered to be cruel to the animal and degrading to the scientists who executed them. The chorus of dissenting voices is not new; it’s merely grown. Animal research today is more carefully regulated by individual institutions, professional organizations like the American Psychological Association and legislation like the Federal Animal Welfare Act. Many activists and scholars argue research on primates should end entirely and that experiments like Harlow’s should never be repeated. “Academics should be on the front lines of condemning such work as well, for they represent a betrayal of the basic notions of dignity and decency we should all be upholding in our research, especially in the case of vulnerable populations in our samples—such as helpless animals or young children,” psychologist Azadeh Aalai wrote in Psychology Today . Animal studies have not disappeared. Research on attachment in monkeys continues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison . But animal studies have declined. New methods—or, depending on how you look at it, old methods—have filled the void. Natural experiments and epidemiological studies, similar to the kind Bowlby employed, have added new insight into the importance of “tender age” attachment . Romanian orphanages established after the fall of the Soviet Union have served as such a study site. The facilities, which have been described as “slaughterhouses of the soul” , have historically had great disparities between the number of children and the number of caregivers (25 or more kids to one adult), meaning few if any children received the physical or emotional care they needed. Many of the children who were raised in these environments have exhibited mental health and behavioral disorders as a result. It’s even had a physical effect, with neurological research showing a dramatic reduction in the literal size of their brains and low levels of brain activity as measured by electroencephalography, or EEG, machines. Similarly, epidemiological research has tracked the trajectories of children in the foster care system in the United States and parts of Europe to see how they differ, on average, from youths in a more traditional home environment. They’ve shown that the risk of mental disorders , suicidal ideation and attempts , and obesity are elevated among these children. Many of these health outcomes appear to be even worse among children in an institutional setting , like a Romanian orphanage, than children placed in foster care, which typically offers kids more individualized attention. Scientists rarely say no to more data. After all, the more observations and perspectives we have, the better we understand a given topic. But alternatives to animal models are under development and epidemiological methodologies are only growing stronger. As a result, we may be able to set some kinds of data—that data collected at the expense of humans or animal —aside. When it comes to lab experiments on parent-child attachment, we may know everything we need to know—and have for more than 60 years. Gluck believes that testing attachment theory at the expense of primates should have ended with Harry Harlow. And he continues to hope people will come to see the irony inherent in harming animals to prove, scientifically, that human children deserve compassion. “Whether it is called mother-infant separation, social deprivation, or the more pleasant sounding ‘nursery rearing,'” Gluck wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2016, “these manipulations cause such drastic damage across many behavioral and physiological systems that the work should not be repeated.” Latest in Mental Health The fuzzy science on whether your pet is actually good for you the fuzzy science on whether your pet is actually good for you. By Michael Schulson/Undark Like cigarettes and alcohol, Surgeon General says social media needs warning labels Like cigarettes and alcohol, Surgeon General says social media needs warning labels By Andrew Paul Harlow's Monkey An unapologetic look at transracial and transnational adoption, why “harlow’s monkey”. In the 1950’s, psychologist Harry Harlow began a series of experiments on baby monkeys, depriving them of their biological mothers and using substitute wire and terry cloth covered “mothers”. Harlow’s goal was to study the nature of attachment and how it affects monkeys who were deprived of their mothers early in life. As an unwitting participant in the human form of Harlow’s monkey experiment, known as trans-racial or trans-cultural adoption, I am constantly seeking to expand my knowledge and understanding of the life-long ramifications of these types of social experiments. According to the State Department, in 2005, over 21,500 children immigrated to the United States for the purpose of adoption, the majority of these children left their native homeland, language, customs, foods and religions for a middle-class, white, American home. The majority of these children also come from a country in which they were part of the racial hegemeny, only to now be part of a racial minority. This blog was born in March of 2006 as a way to put down my thoughts about international and transracial adoption from a point of view that is often missing – the adoptee themselves. As a social worker in the field of adoptions, and having spent a lot of time volunteering or working with adoptees, and having the benefit of a social work education, I wanted to connect-the-gaps in what I saw as an adoptive parent and adoption professional dominant discourse around adoption. Part 2: Why I named the blog Harlow’s Monkey Since this is hot-button item, I thought it was time to discuss the subject of Harlow and his monkey experiments in a little more depth, and the reason why I chose this name for my blog. Keep in mind that I am not an expert on Harlow or his science; I just found that there are a lot of parallels between Harlow’s experiments and adoption and Harlow was attempting to learn about the nature of attachment and what happens when infant monkeys are removed from their mothers. I am far from being creative or unique in choosing to name my blog, Harlow’s Monkey . Many others before me have made the connection to adoption. Harlow himself compared the baby monkeys in his experiments to human children and aimed to study how maternal deprivation and love and attachment influenced human beings. Harlow’s famous monkey experiment hinged on the question of whether infant monkeys removed from their mothers would respond to substitute wire monkey “mothers” that provided food (physical needs) over terry-cloth covered wire “mothers” without food (comfort). Harlow’s results found that these infant monkeys would cling to and respond to the soft, fabric covered monkeys over the plain wire “mothers” with food, thus  showing that nurturing and the need for affection were greater than the need for food. Harlow studied this concept in a second phase of his experiment. He separated the baby monkeys into two groups; one with the terry cloth mother, one with the wire mother. Both groups of monkeys ate the same amount but the behaviors of the wire monkey babies were markedly different than the cloth monkey babies. Especially important to note is that those monkeys who had the cloth-covered “mothers” were able to calm themselves better when frightened with stimuli; they also hadquicker resolutions after being frightened to base-level behavior. The wire-covered monkey babies, however, had great difficulty when frightened. They did not go to their mother; instead, they would screech, rock back and forth or throw themselves on the floor. Harlow’s experiments showed us that attachment and bonding is more important to the infant monkey than just providing for physical needs. That is, we want to develop in our children the next few steps on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; what I’ve called socialization (family, friends, community – in other words, a sense of belonging); self esteem and self-actualization. According to Harlow’s own words ( Love in Infant Monkeys, Scientific American 200, June 1959 ): Thus all the objective tests we have been able to devise agree in showing that the infant monkey’s relationship to its surrogate mother is a full one. Comparison with the behavior of infant monkeys raised by their real mothers confirms this view. Like our experimental monkeys, these infants spend many hours a day clinging to their mothers, and run to them for comfort or reassurance when they are frightened. The deep and abiding bond between mother and child appears to be essentially thesame, whether the mother is real or a cloth  surrogate. . . . The depth and persistence of attachment to the mother depend not only on the kind of stimuli that the young animal receives but also on when it receives them. . . . Clinical experience with human beings indicates that people who have been deprived of affection in infancy may have difficulty forming affectional ties in later life. From preliminary experiments with our monkeys we have also found that their affectional responses develop, or fail to develop, according to a similar pattern. In naming my blog Harlow’s Monkey , I was not aiming to “diss” my parents. Harlow’s Monkey was named to illustrate the broader issues that I see in adoption. Whether it’s “harsh” or not, the truth is that for those of us who were adopted, we are being raised by “substitute” parents. Just as we children are often substitute children for our parents, especially those of us who were adopted as a result of our parents’ infertility. But as Harlow’s experiments clearly show, it is the quality of the comfort and the ability to meet our emotional needs that is important and not just the ability to feed, clothe and shelter us. Which is an important consideration when thinking about things such as home studies. Home studies and foster care licenses were once based more on the ability of the parents to provide the shelter and safety requirements for a child. We now know that it takes much more; the ability of the parent to provide emotional comfort and care. This is especially important to me because when we think about transracial adoption and international adoption, we social workers look at the home study and see that yes, this parent or these parents can meet the physical and safety needs of a child; and they seem warm and caring too. But without an ability to provide for our emotional and psychological comfort around our racial and cultural needs , we are left alone like Harlow’s rhesus monkeys and their wire-only mothers. Do I think that I am part of a large, social experiment? You bet. Just like Harlow’s rhesus monkeys, we transracially and internationally adopted persons have been poked and prodded and been the focus of many evaluations and studies in order to see whether it “works” – that is, are we psychologically all right after being removed from our families and communities of color into mostly white, middle- to upper-class families? How are we transracial and international adoptees faring, considering that the current federal legislation in the United States prohibits considering the cultural and racial needs of a child? Harry Harlow didn’t walk into his lab, conduct his experiments on one baby monkey, then call it a day. He repeated his experiments, like good scientists do, in order to achieve some amount of reliability and validity in his results. On a micro level, I am just my parents’ daughter, sister to my siblings, auntie to my nieces and nephew, grandchild and cousin. But I am also part of a macro system of children who were born under circumstances that led to my being placed in a substitute home. Over 200,000 of us from Korea alone. When people focus on individual cases, one (or two) parent(s) and one child, it’s easy to forget the larger societal patterns that happen as a result. We are talking about diasporas and migrations. We are talking about displacement and traumas. I am not “dissing” my parents, because they did what they were advised to do by their social workers and adoption agency. They raised me as as if I was a white child born to them, just like my siblings. It is the larger, societal issues, such as the philosophy of the times that advised social workers 20 years ago to raise their children like “white, biological children” that trouble me. Harlow’s Monkey is my way of lifting the micro-level veil over our eyes and examining the macro- and global issues around the practice of adoption. For more on Harry Harlow, check out  The Adoption History Project – Harry Harlow For more on Harry Harlow and his monkey experiments, see: The Nature of Love and Wikipedia’s entry on Harry Harlow . Share this: Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now. Subscribe Subscribed Copy shortlink Report this content View post in Reader Manage subscriptions Collapse this bar Expert Statements Campaign Updates Psychological Torture Experiments at NIH Must Stop UPDATE: Following an intensive year-long PETA campaign, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is ending the cruel maternal deprivation experiments on baby monkeys and the Poolesville, Maryland, laboratory is being shut down. Read more . Where It All Began … Harry Harlow’s psychological experiments on monkeys in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were infamous for their cruelty. Harlow tore newborns away from their mothers, gave some infants  “surrogate mothers” made of wire and wood, and kept other traumatized babies in isolation in tiny metal boxes, sometimes for up to a year. Realizing that such horrific conditions resulted in long-term, debilitating psychological trauma for the infants, Harlow began expanding his project. He and his then-student Stephen Suomi created the “ pit of despair ,” a dark metal box designed to isolate the monkeys from everything in the outside world. Within days, the monkeys kept inside the pit were driven insane, incessantly rocking and clutching at themselves, tearing and biting their own skin and ripping out their hair. When finally removed from isolation, they were too traumatized to interact with other monkeys, and some were so shocked and depressed that they starved themselves to death. To see what would happen when tormented monkeys became mothers themselves, Suomi and Harlow created what they called a “rape rack” in order to restrain and impregnate female monkeys, then they would later watch and photograph the mentally ill mothers physically abusing and killing their own babies. Harlow died in 1981 and, though most people believe his experiments are a thing of the past, PETA has learned that his protégé, Stephen Suomi, has continued to conduct similar maternal deprivation and depression experiments on infant monkeys for more than 30 years in taxpayer-funded laboratories at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) facility in Poolesville, Maryland. A Cycle of Suffering PETA has obtained documents, hundreds of photographs, and more than 500 hours of never-before-seen high-definition videos taken inside this NIH facility, detailing the ongoing psychological abuse of baby monkeys in disgustingly cruel and archaic experiments that have been funded by more than $30 million just in the past seven years . Each year, 40 to 60 monkeys are born at this NIH facility, many intentionally bred to be genetically predisposed to mental illness. Half of the monkeys born each year are separated from their mothers within hours of birth and never returned. Some infants are given a cloth-covered water bottle as a “surrogate” mother. As in Harlow and Suomi’s earlier experiments, these motherless infants are more likely to suffer from severe anxiety, aggression, depression, diarrhea, hair loss, and other physical and mental illnesses, as well as engaging in self-destructive behavior such as biting themselves and pulling out their own hair. The monkeys undergo years of terrifying and often painful experiments to exacerbate their symptoms of mental illness and test the severity of their psychological trauma. Currently, approximately 200 young monkeys are involved in the experiments. The Video That NIH Doesn't Want You to See Videos obtained by PETA—that NIH unsuccessfully tried to charge PETA $100,000 for— show how NIH experimenters terrorize the baby monkeys they have intentionally made mentally ill in recent and ongoing experiments. Confused, distraught newborns are taken from their mothers and held down by experimenters, and their heads are forced from side to side to see which position they prefer. Infants are caged with their mothers, who are chemically sedated, have their nipples taped over, and are placed in a car seat. The terrified babies scream and cry, climbing onto and frantically shaking their unresponsive mothers. In at least one case, experimenters can be heard laughing while a mother tries to remain awake to comfort her distraught child. In some trials, the experimenters even release an electronic snake into the cage with the baby monkeys, who innately fear the reptiles. Newborn infants are restrained inside tiny mesh cages and placed in “startle chambers.” The experimenters then deliberately scare the babies with loud noises, causing them to cry out and try futilely to hide or escape. The videos and photographs depict only a portion of the torment that these animals endure. As the babies grow older, they are shuttled between NIH laboratories and subjected to years of additional experiments. Some of the distressed monkeys have devices screwed into their skulls so experimenters can inject their brains with a variety of drugs already being safely used to treat human children and adults suffering from mental illness, including Prozac. Other young monkeys are injected with large doses of ethanol—deliberately turning them into alcoholics which increases their anxiety, aggression, depression, and social withdrawal. Others are sold to Wake Forest University, where they are subjected to similar alcohol addiction experiments. Many of the monkeys are killed and dissected before their 8th birthday. Bad Science These experiments continue to be funded and conducted even though they are largely irrelevant to human mental illness and the experimenters themselves have admitted that the work is not applicable to our treatment of human psychological trauma and brain disorders. Suomi has long acknowledged the irrelevance of his torturous experiments. In 1977, he wrote the following: [W]hether actual data obtained from nonhuman primates have added measurably to our understanding of human development is another matter. … [S]uch cases are relatively rare. Most monkey data that readily generalize to humans have not uncovered new facts about human behavior; rather, they have only verified principles that have already been formulated from previous human data. After four more decades of these experiments, nothing has changed. In a recent paper, Suomi and his colleagues drew this conclusion: [M]any findings from behavioral and biochemical studies in monkeys and other animals are not replicated in humans. Accordingly, this study cannot directly address the safety and efficacy of [anti-depressant drugs] in children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders. … [T]his animal model of maternal separation has never been validated as a measure of drug efficacy in humans. … The only way to know definitively whether [anti-depressant drugs work] in humans would be to study our species. Meanwhile, researchers throughout the country are suffering from a shortage of funds as they conduct human-based research that can demonstrably benefit human health and well-being. Epidemiological studies, modern brain-scanning techniques, and genetic studies with human volunteers have already established, and continue to uncover, the connections between genes, early life stress, and the development of mental illness in humans. Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player 13.7 Cosmos & Culture Still now, should lab monkeys be deprived of their mothers. Barbara J. King On Monday, the animal advocacy organization PETA released material in support of its campaign to shut down a series of experiments on infant rhesus monkeys carried out at the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, part of the National Institutes of Health. The material includes excerpts from more than 500 hours of videotape obtained by PETA through the Freedom of Information Act, analysis of scientific papers published by the NIH researchers, and letters from scientists not affiliated with PETA who explained why the experiments are cruel and examples of poor science. The NIH experiments past and future, according to NIH documents obtained by PETA, are attempting to show how environmental influences, like abuse and neglect, act together with genetics to produce individual developmental trajectories. I was one of the scientists to write a letter, and I appear in the short video excerpt prepared by PETA, which you can watch below. (A word of warning: This footage is tough to see, because baby monkeys are intentionally scared and stressed in intense ways.) The rhesus monkeys in this lab are intentionally bred for increased likelihood of psychopathology (via alleles of the 5H-TTT and MAO-1 genes, for those who know genetics), some are separated from their mothers 24 hours after birth, and made to undergo trauma ranging from being frightened by masked humans or strange noises, to being made to observe their mother fade into drugged unresponsiveness. In monkeys such as these rhesus, and the baboons I observed in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, years ago, the mother-infant relationship is the primary one — and it's extremely strong. Under normal circumstances, the babies are clasped to the mother's body continuously for weeks, at which point the little one embarks on a path of greater independence. This means venturing off the mom's body and scampering a few feet, at first, to explore food or other monkeys, then rushing back to mom's safety. I remember so vividly from the Kenyan savanna watching the babies' first brave-then-not-so-brave-after-all steps away from the individual closest to them in the world, and the rushing back to her for a dose of comfort. At NIH, the infants in these experiments, year after year, aren't so lucky. They suffer doubly because they are first taken from their mothers, then left to cope with trauma on their own. It's clear to me, and to the other scientists including famed chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall who also protested in letter form what NIH is doing, that the baby monkeys suffer emotionally. That suffering is the overwhelming factor for me in assessing these experiments. But there's another point to be made as well. Many people know about Harry Harlow's maternal-deprivation experiments with monkeys from the 1950s. Harlow showed us that baby monkeys collapse into depression and otherwise alter their behavior significantly when taken from their mothers. Yet the NIH lab has sustained the same type of research for the past 30 years, producing results that — in understanding human psychopathology such as anxiety and depression — are of little or no value. Modern techniques of neuroscience, including imaging scans of human brains, make effective alternatives. Even participants in a workshop at the National Institutes of Mental Health who were entirely open to designing future opportunities for animal models for human health, including human mental health, reached this conclusion back in 2001: "The probability of developing comprehensive animal models that accurately reflect the relative influences of factors contributing to anxiety disorder syndromes [in humans] is quite low." PETA's director for laboratory investigations, Justin Goodman, summed up PETA's own perspective for me in an email sent yesterday: "These experiments are unjustifiable from every perspective. They cause baby monkeys crippling emotional trauma, they have never lead to or improved treatments for human mental illness, and they are superseded by modern non-animal research methods that are actually relevant to humans. It's shocking that NIH has allowed these studies to continue for 30 years, but they can't go on any longer." When CBS news covered the PETA campaign on Monday morning, NIH scientists responded to PETA's charges. Lead researcher Stephen Suomi told CBS , in part: "The same behavioral, neurological and health changes seen in nursery-reared monkeys are seen in children who were orphaned from their mothers, or raised by depressed, abusive, or neglectful mothers." We have known that fact for over 50 years now. What was considered novel, relevant and ethical in Harlow's day is none of those things now. Contrary to what NIH told CBS, the Freedom of Information Act files (which I have seen myself) report that the human-intruder experiments, and the selective breeding and maternal-deprivation practices that underlie them, are funded to continue at NIH through 2017. Barbara's most recent book on animals was released in paperback in April. 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See this new baby monkey at Zoo Boise, born for genetic diversity Visitors at Zoo Boise may spot a new addition to its animal family — a miniature white-maned monkey, clinging to the back of a parent or one of its older siblings. The zoo welcomed a cotton-top tamarin baby in April as part of its participation in the Species Survival Plan, which aims to ensure the survival of species through managed breeding, said Harry Peachey, the general curator for Zoo Boise. Cotton-top tamarins, named for their characteristic tufts of white facial fur, are native to northwest Colombia. But because of deforestation and illegal pet trade, they’re considered critically endangered, with fewer than 6,000 left in the wild, Peachey told the Idaho Statesman. And their populations continue to decrease. Zoo Boise has implemented the Species Surviv al Plan — a program run by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a nonprofit that accredits U.S. zoos —to help maintain genetically diverse captive populations. The zoo’s involvement in the survival plan entails making a studbook, with important information about each animal that helps zoos find the right breeding partners for them. Specifically, zoos look at mean kinship, which is the average amount of genetic material an individual animal has in common with all others in a population. Zoos then prioritize healthy animals that have less in common with the rest of the population, Peachey said. Parents of the baby cotton-top tamarin, Eddie and Mimi, were matched as part of the Species Survival Plan, Peachey told the Statesman. The new addition to their family is one of four children they’ve had as an effort to diversify populations. “We want the act of visiting the zoo to be a conservation action,” Jeff Agosta, a spokesperson for Zoo Boise, told the Statesman. Peachey said reintroducing animals that were born under human care, like in a zoo, to their wild habitat is the ultimate goal. But for now, it’s important to maintain healthy captive populations. “Genetic diversity is the foundation that animals use to adapt to change. And if these animals were ever reintroduced to the wild, they’re going to face tremendous challenges,” Peachey said. The conservation strategy is a change from past practices, he added, when zoos prioritized producing as many animals as possible over genetic diversity for endangered species, including the cotton-top tamarin. The primate is one of the smallest in the world, with adults weighing 1 pound and babies weighing only 1 ½ ounces. Despite their small size, they serve critical functions in the Colombian forest, like dispersing seeds, pollinating plants and keeping other species populations in check, according to the New England Primate Conservancy, a wildlife conservation organization. For the cotton-top tamarin, captive numbers have been increasing due to the Species Survival Plan, Peachey said. But he also noted the importance of inspiring zoo-goers to care about the animals they’ve seen. A study published in Conservation Biology showed that after people have been to a zoo, they care more about conservation efforts. “How can you not watch them and be concerned about what’s going to happen to this species in the future?” Peachey said. 480 IMAGES Harry Harlow's Baby Monkey Experiment Harlows Monkey Experiment Photograph by Photo Researchers, Inc Harlow’s Monkey Experiment Video of Cruel NIH Experiments on Baby Monkeys Goes Viral Video of Cruel NIH Experiments on Baby Monkeys Goes Viral In Harry Harlow's Experiments With Baby Monkeys VIDEO Andrew Tate : The Monkey Experiment ( MUST WATCH ) Robotic baby monkey experiment@MRINDIANHACKER @CrazyXYZ #shorts How Evolution Created the World’s Most Scientifically Confusing Monkey Baby monkey AKA was angry and wanted Dad to punish BonBon for biting his painful hand बंदर भी अपनो के लिए रोते है Baby monkey fake mother experiment COMMENTS Harry Harlow Monkey Experiments: Cloth Mother vs Wire Mother Experiment 1. Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry toweling cloth. In the first group, the terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle ... Harlow's Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact Based on this observation, Harlow designed his now-famous surrogate mother experiment. In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same When treated as a human, the baby chimp acted like one—until her physiology and development held her back. ... The experiment, however, ended rather abruptly and mysteriously. Harry Harlow and the Nature of Love and Affection The Monkey Mother Experiment . His most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different "mothers." One was made of soft terrycloth but provided no food. The other was made of wire but provided nourishment from an attached baby bottle. Harlow's Monkey Experiments: 3 Findings About Attachment Harlow's Monkey Experiments: 3 Findings About Attachment. Attachment theory refers to the idea that an infant is born with the biological need to have contact with their primary caregiver in the first few months of their life (Colman, 2001). When that need is met, the infant develops a secure attachment style; however, when that need is not ... Harry Harlow Monkey clinging to the cloth mother surrogate in fear test. Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 - December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. Harlow's Monkey Experiment Harlow's monkey experiment tackled both hypotheses: if the bond between mother and child is purely based on physiological need. To do this, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their biological mothers within 6 to 12 hours after being born. He then placed these baby monkeys in a nursery with inanimate 'surrogate' mothers - one who is ... Harlow monkey experiments (video) Harlow monkey experiments. The Harlow Monkey Experiments tested the bond between mother and child. Baby monkeys preferred a cloth "mother" that provided comfort over a wire "mother" that provided food. This showed that attachment is based more on comfort than nourishment. The cloth "mother" also acted as a secure base, encouraging exploration. A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Harry Harlow Starting in 1957, Harlow worked with rhesus monkeys, which are more mature at birth than humans, but like human babies show a range of emotions and need to be nursed. He took infant monkeys away ... Harlow's Monkey Experiment (Definition Harlow's Monkey experiments looked at the influence of parental guidance and interaction during early development. Infant monkeys were placed in isolation, away from their mothers. In other experiments, he took infant monkeys away from their mothers but placed them in a cage with "surrogate" mothers. In both sets of experiments, he found ... Harlow's Monkey Experiment & Attachment Theory The Harlow monkey experiment also showed that the younger the child, the more crucial the need for comfort. ... the baby monkeys seemed to love the cloth mother and interact with it in the same ... How Harry Harlow Used Monkeys For Bizarre 'Love' Experiments In the mid-20th century, Harry Harlow conducted cruel experiments on baby rhesus monkeys to prove that the bond between mother and child went far beyond the need for food. University of Wisconsin-Madison Harry Harlow with one of the rhesus monkeys and its surrogate cloth "mother.". Harry Harlow was fascinated with the idea of love. Harlow's Monkey Experiment & Attachment Theory This video explains psychologist Harry Harlow's famous monkey experiments and how they helped develop attachment theory in developmental psychology. In the l... Pit of despair The pit of despair was a name used by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow for a device he designed, technically called a vertical chamber apparatus, that he used in experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1970s. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of depression.Researcher Stephen Suomi described the device as "little ... Adoption History: Harry Harlow, Monkey Love Experiments These monkey love experiments had powerful implications for any and all separations of mothers and infants, including adoption, as well as childrearing in general. In his University of Wisconsin laboratory, Harlow probed the nature of love, aiming to illuminate its first causes and mechanisms in the relationships formed between infants and ... Harlow's Studies on Dependency in Monkeys Harry Harlow shows that infant rhesus monkeys appear to form an affectional bond with soft, cloth surrogate mothers that offered no food but not with wire su... The Science of Affection: How a Rebel Researcher ... Harry Harlow observes a baby monkey interacting with a cloth mother. ... His most famous experiment devised two versions of an artificial surrogate mother for the baby monkeys — one made entirely of wire and the other, designed to be cozy and cuddly, of wire and cloth; both were internally heated to simulate the warmth of a real mother's ... These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation Harlow's monkey experiments proved a pivotal turning point in animal research, scientific ethics, and our understanding of primate attachment. ... Harlow set up an experiment that allowed baby ... Harry Harlow's pit of despair: Depression in monkeys and men 1 INTRODUCTION. The American psychologist Harry Frederick Harlow (1905-1981) belongs to the most well-known psychologists of the 20th century (Haggbloom et al., 2002).Working with baby rhesus monkeys and artificial mothers created from different materials, he found that baby monkeys prefer a nonfeeding soft cloth mother providing physical comfort and warmth over a wire mother providing only ... Why "Harlow's Monkey?" Why "Harlow's Monkey?". In the 1950's, psychologist Harry Harlow began a series of experiments on baby monkeys, depriving them of their biological mothers and using substitute wire and terry cloth covered "mothers". Harlow's goal was to study the nature of attachment and how it affects monkeys who were deprived of their mothers ... NIH Child Abuse: Experiments on Baby Monkeys Exposed Harry Harlow's psychological experiments on monkeys in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s were infamous for their cruelty. Harlow tore newborns away from their mothers, gave some infants "surrogate mothers" made of wire and wood, and kept other traumatized babies in isolation in tiny metal boxes, sometimes for up to a year. These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child ... To test the truth of the behaviorist's claims that things like food mattered more than affection, Harlow set up an experiment that allowed baby monkeys, forcibly separated from their mothers at ... Affectional Response in the Infant Monkey Affectional Response in the Infant Monkey: Orphaned baby monkeys develop a strong and persistent attachment to inanimate surrogate mothers. Harry F. Harlow and Robert R. Zimmermann Authors Info & Affiliations. Science. 21 Aug 1959. Vol 130, Issue 3373. pp. 421-432. DOI: 10.1126/science.130.3373.421. PREVIOUS ARTICLE. Still Now, Should Lab Monkeys Be Deprived Of Their Mothers? Many people know about Harry Harlow's maternal-deprivation experiments with monkeys from the 1950s. Harlow showed us that baby monkeys collapse into depression and otherwise alter their behavior ... Perfect match? See this new baby monkey at Zoo Boise, born for genetic Visitors at Zoo Boise may spot a new addition to its animal family — a miniature white-maned monkey, clinging to the back of a parent or one of its older siblings. The zoo welcomed a cotton-top tamarin baby in April as part of its participation in the Species Survival Plan, which aims to ensure the survival of species through managed breeding ... essay homework paper phd project resume review study thesis