HARRY F. HARLOW

BY- UNNATI SHAH

• "So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists." – Harry Harlow, "The Nature of Love," 1958

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development.

TIME LINE

• BORN – October 31, 1905 in Fairfield• DIED- December 6, 1981 in Tuscon• EDUCATION- Stanford college (BA and Phd)

and Reed college• AWARDS – National medal of science for

biological science• WORKED- psychology staff at the University

of Wisconsin (Madison).

MAIN PUBLICATIONS

• Harlow, H. F. (1950. The effect of large cortical lesions on learned behavior in monkeys.Science.

•Harlow, H. F. (1958). Biological and Biochemical Bases of Behavior. University of Wisconsin Press.

•Harlow, H. F., et al. (1971). The sad ones: Studies in depression. Psychology Today 4(12), 61-63.

•Harlow, H. F. (1973). A variable-temperature surrogate mother for studying attachment in infant monkeys. Behavior Research Methods 5(3), 269-272.

•Harlow, H. F. (1975). Lust, latency and love: Simian secrets of successful sex. Journal of Sex Research 11(2), 79-90.

• Recommended Reading

Best Known For:• Social isolation experiments with rhesus monkeys.• His research played an important role in shaping

our understanding of child development, child care and child rearing.

• His theory, "Learning to Learn", described the ability of animals to slowly learn a general rule that could then be applied to rapidly solve new problem sets.

• He suggested that paying attention to young children would "spoil" them and that affection should be limited.

• Harlow's work instead demonstrated the absolute importance of developing safe, secure, and supportive emotional bonds with caregivers during early childhood.

• Many experts at the time also believed that feeding was the primary force between the mother-and-child bonds. Harlow's work suggested that while feedings are important, it is the physical closeness and contact that provides the comfort and security that a child needs for normal development.

EXPERIMENT

• His theory hinged on the universal need for contact. Harlow's famous wire/cloth "mother" monkey studies demonstrated that the need for affection created a stronger bond between mother and infant than did physical needs (food).

THEORY OF THE EXPERIMENT

Method

• Harlow carried out a number of variations using sixteen young isolated monkeys who were separated from their mother a few hours after birth.

• 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 experiment was conducted on 2 groups.• 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.

• 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.

• He 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 hard wire.

• Harlow hypothesized that members of the first group benefitted from a psychological resource—emotional attachment—unavailable to members of the second.

• 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”

• 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,

Findings • Harlow noticed that the monkeys would

spend most time clinging to the cloth mother and occasionally feeding from the wire mother. When the monkeys were stressed by a mechanical toy banging a drum the monkeys would always run to the cloth mum for safety suggesting an attachment. Also the monkeys with only wire mothers produced water faeces which was attributed to stress.

Conclusion• The evidence suggested that warmth and

comfort rather than food were more important in nurturing an attachment.

EVALUATION

• Clearly because Harlow used monkeys it is difficult to generalize the findings and conclusions to humans. Critics of Harlow's claims have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimated the importance of contact comfort and underestimated the importance of nursing.

• There are also serious ethical issues with this study.

• On the plus side, the theory can be said to beneficial in that it has stimulated a lot of research into the interactions that take place between parents and their children.

RECENT RESEARCH

• Since Harlow's pioneering work on touch, recent work in rats have found evidence that touch during infancy have resulted in a decrease in corticosteroid, a steroid hormone involved in stress, and an increase in glucocorticoid receptors in many regions of the brain

REFERENCES

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow• file:///D:/

semester%202/TOL/harlow/Home.htm• file:///D:/semester%202/TOL/harlow/Adoptio

n%20History%20%20Harry%20Harlow,%20Monkey%20Love%20Experiments.htm

• http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Harry_Harlow

• http://muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/harlow.htm

THANK YOU