Harry Frederick Harlow American Psychology

After receiving his Doctorate, Dr. Harlow became employed at the University of Wisconsin. He was an outstanding professor who reveled in educating students in psychology. He aided several students in obtaining their PhD as well. His students thought very highly of him. Lack of funding restricted Harlow of a functioning laboratory. With the assistance of his graduate students, he found a vacant building that was renovated. This lab became his “Primate Laboratory”. This was the first of its kind at that time. Throughout his career, Harry was recognized with several honors, which included the Gold Medal from American Psychological Foundation (LeRoy, 2008).

Harlow’s experiment started when the monkeys were “separated at birth from their mother” (Green, N.D.). Therefore, the monkeys had no idea who their actual mother was when the experiment was starting. The monkeys were put in separate cages and half of them were put with a “cold wire mother and the other was a warm, fuzzy cloth mother” (King,2017).  The infant monkeys were being fed by either the cold wire or the fuzzy cloth artificial mothers. Harlow then put the

I agree that the Harry Harlow study is entirely relevant to life today, useful, and in no way cruel to the monkeys involved. It demonstrates the importance of contact comfort

John Dupont grew up with an immeasurable amount of wealth. The story of his life justifies the fact that happiness doesn’t reside in fortune. After analyzing his behavior, the best way to explain it would be through the psychodynamic perspective. When John was very young his parents divorced and his father left, leaving him and his siblings to live with their mother. His father made it very known that he didn’t want to be apart of his son's life when he would require John to make appointments to see him. It is said that John never really had a childhood. He wasn’t good socially and ate his meals alone in his room until he was 13 years old, completely isolating himself from the world.

By Richard Thripp for Prof. John Beltran, PSY 4604 sec. 0W58, Univ. of Central Fla., Sp. 2013

In the middle of the twentieth century, Harry and Margaret Harlow began to study the effects of body contact in terms of developmental attachment. Their breakthrough experiments involved infant monkeys separated from their mother near birth and raised in cages with two surrogate mothers: one a wire cylinder and the other wrapped in terry cloth. After varying such details as location of the feeding bottle, rocking, and warmth, the Harlows were startled to find that the monkeys bonded much more closely to the cloth mother, regardless of whether or not "she" provided the food. (Myers, 2011, pp. 149-151). In parallel to Harlow's monkeys was Victor, found in the forests of France in 1800, when he became the first feral child to be successfully restored to society as well as scientifically studied by Parisian doctor Jean Marc Itard. Followed by children of many ages hailing from the abandoned flats of the Ukraine to the urbanized and bustling streets of Los Angeles, CA, feral children were defined by their lack of human care, usually because of abusive or irresponsible parents. Such isolation from their own society often resulted in resorting to animals, especially dogs, for love and warmth, and to wild, abnormal behavior. None were able to completely and certainly bounce back from their cruel circumstances, a fact shown in their lack of humanity, as Itard defined it, in one of two areas: emotional empathy or liguistic communication. ("Wild Child The Story Of Feral Children

In 1958, Harry Harlow studied the priorities of these needs in his cloth and wire mother experiments. Baby monkeys separated from their mothers at birth were placed in isolation. Two dolls were placed in the cage, one wrapped in

Further into the research when the terry cloth surrogate got taken out of the cage the monkeys would become highly distressed. The findings of Harlow’s research proved that Bowlbys contention was right, the infant parent bond was based on inmate tendencies and not cupboard love, as when the surrogate mother was placed in the cage with no milk the babies would still be attached. Harlow’s study and research went on for 20 years in which the experiments took on a disturbing unethical approach. He started breeding monkeys and keeping them in separate cages with no visual or physical access to the outside world, ‘when the isolation-reared monkeys grew up, they developed into highly socially disturbed adults” (Discovering Psychology, chapter 5, pg. 209). Influenced by human attachment to abusive parents Harlow wanted to find out if an abusive surrogate would break the attachment, a nasty surrogate mum was used and a blast of cold air from the surrogate was used, violent enough to throw the baby monkey against the bars of the cage. ‘Despite this abuse, the baby monkeys continued to cling and maintain proximity to their monstrously abusive surrogate mother’ (Discovering

Harlow’s developed his studies with orphan’s rhesus monkeys in laboratory. By using two made wire models mothers. One of the wire mothers had a bottle to feed the baby and other, had no bottle, but it was covered on terry-cloth. Harlow observed how important was the bound made by the monkey baby on both surrogate mothers, Babies used the wired with bottle to feed only but the one covered on terry-cloth provided the emotional bound and further on the experiments, the terry-cloth provided confidence and security. (Harlow, H.F. 1962)

Harlow is still considered controversial for his popular Wire Mother Experiment. This experiment took young monkeys away from their mothers, and replaced them with either a cloth mother, or a wire mother instead. This revealed the impact of contact a mother during infancy. While terrified, the young monkeys would run to the cloth mother for comfort rather than the wire mother even though the wire mother was the source of food. Harlow would say that infants will experience failure to thrive if not cared for properly by a

In chapter six “Monkey Love” Harry Harlow, an American psychologist, wanted to prove that babies prefer a gentle mother over a feeding mother. Harlow chose macaques for his experiment because they are the closest specie compared with humans. The experiment that Harlow conducted consisted of the infant monkeys being taken away from their birth mother, being placed in cages with a wired-clothed mother and a wired feeding mother. The monkeys preferred the clothed mother over the wire feeding mother. The findings of the experiment were over the edge, says Harlow, “We were not surprised to discover that contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable, but we did not expect it to overshadow so

Harry Harlow was aware of the controversy post World War II on the role of biological instincts in the development of conduct and emotions and, in response, he presented his "Babyhood and Motherhood project". In this work Harlow bred and raised infant rhesus monkeys in isolation to be their human influence and keep them from spreading infections. Harlow wanted to understand their natural behavior without another’s influence, so he gave the monkeys two inanimate mothers., one made of wood and rubber wrapped in cloth with a light behind her to give off warmth and one made of wire. The warm cloth one which provided contact comfort was the preferred one that the babies clung to.

Pennington, D., McLoughlin, J. (2003) ' Debates in Psychology’ in (ed) Advanced Psychology. Child Development, Perspectives & Methods. United Kingdom: Hodder Education Group, pp.232.

1. Harry Harlow was interested in love’s role as a basic built-in need. He was also interested in how love in early life affects adulthood, and comfort contact versus health thirst.

Harlow led psychology away from the paradigm of clinical sterility that had misguided a century of research into child-rearing. Given the tragic state of children in "scientifically informed" institutions, there can be no doubt that a great many lives were saved by the work of Harlow and his colleagues. The life-saving revelations came with a price: Harlow’s primate subjects were treated with extreme cruelty--not gratuitously, but by the very design of his experiments. (Karl Giberson)