Harry Harlow: A Revolutionary Who Changed Child-Rearing Practices in Industrialized Countries

The types of studies in the area of attachments before Mary Ainsworth were the works of Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, and William Blatz. Harry Harlow was born October 31st, 1905 in Iowa to a small farming community. He obtained his BA and PhD at Stanford University in experimental psychology. Harlow did studies on attachment with baby rhesus monkeys. According to Harlow, he “showed that maternal care in infancy was essential for adult sexual adjustment and mental health” (Vicedo, 2009). In his study, he had two replicas of maternal monkeys for the baby monkeys. One of the ‘mothers’ was warm to the touch as well as being soft. The other just had food and was just made of wire. The baby monkey showed more interest in the warm and fuzzy mother and barely went to the one with food. This showed Harlow that the baby monkey cared more about the warm and fuzzy mother. The second study on the baby monkey was scaring the baby monkey. The baby went running to the mother that provided warmth. To summarize, “the moral of this legend is one about the power of biology and the determinant effects of factors like mother love, which are necessary to fulfill an organism’s innate needs” (Vicedo, 2009). This was also an important conclusion to a

The second section portrays behaviorist John B. Watson and psychologist Arnold Gesell. In this case, Gesell takes on the “soft” approach with his views that children should be treated gently and softly and treated as equal individuals. Watson, however, took a much different direction with his “hard” views of “conditioning” babies, not cuddling them; that they were merely a product of their reactions to various

Family Values talks about how children rearing was changed through various books on parenting advice literature. Between 1780 and 1830, middle- class Americans wanted to start a project for child rearing for first generation born Americans after they aquired independence. Shippen and Wayland were both parents that represented the effort Americans were trying to make in rearing their children. They both constantly wrote ways on how to rear children. They both got their ideas on how to rear children by observing their own children and how the parent should act to correct the child’s behavior. Then came along several books and magazines aimed at children on how they should be raised. The purpose of these books was to teach children how to read and write,

Lauren Slater’s “Monkey Love,” opens up about Harry Harlow’s life and his experiences with love and the ways to ruin it(133). As a child he was interested about the animals at the zoo and particularly the orangutans he would see. Later on he began to wonder if the monkeys were able to similarly feel and express love. Also, if it was only a mere feeling that could be felt for only one person or if it could be transferred onto someone else. However, Harry Harlow's experiments were deadly and only his pure needs were met in the end. As a result of the experiments, monkey’s were raped, killed by one another, and babies were starved from the feeling of what love was. In the second video the babies were shown being taken from their mothers and put

At the time, it was said that love began as a feeding bond with the mother and applied by extension to other family members. Other theories claimed that humans and other social animals lived in organized societies simply to help with sexual contact. Starting in 1957, Harlow worked with rhesus monkeys. The reason behind why he chose this specific type of breed was because the monkeys that they were utilizing were more mature at birth than humans, but like human babies show a range of emotions and needed to be nursed. During the experimentations, he took infant monkeys away from their real mothers and gave them instead two artificial mothers. One of the models were made

food, or oral stimulation, was the primary driving force of the infant rhesus monkeys need for their mother, and thus the mother’s affection was the source for their secondary drive). Harlow also decided to disprove the theory of behaviorist theories such as classical conditioning. He sought to disregard the theories bought forth by such people as B.F. Skinner and John Watson—he thought of them as too cold and mechanical to be thought of as an explanation for our growth and development. Therefore, as Harlow puts it, “these theories limit our understanding of the cognitive capabilities of our species” (qtd. in Suomi, Horst, and Veer 358).

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.

Although Harlow did terrible things, his net effect on the world was a positive. The monkeys lost are a shame, but how do non-human lives measure up to something that rocked the world of psychology, and indirectly bettered millions of humans lives?

Harlow’s experiment with baby monkey’s demonstrated how important a mothers affection is during early childhood development. Harlow conducted an experiment with baby rhesus monkeys that had just been born. The experiment was trying to see whether the monkey was attached to its mother for necessities such as food, water, etc or for a mothers love. The newly born monkey was placed with two different “mothers” one mother was made of terry cloth and the other was made of wire. The mother that was made of wire could feed the monkey while the other mother made from terry cloth could not. The experiment showed that the monkey showed more attention to the mother made of terry cloth than the mother made of wire. Harlow also done an experiment

In Discovering Love, we learn about Harry Harlow and his studies with rhesus monkeys and love. Many psychologists agree on the theory that what we experience with our main caretaker as small children affects how we perceive love and react to closeness when we’re older. Harry Harlow believed in this theory and decided to test it on baby rhesus monkeys. Harlow used rhesus monkeys as subjects instead of humans because it was deemed unethical to put humans through such experiments, and rhesus monkeys and humans have similar behavior. He noticed that the baby monkeys became attached to the cloth diapers that were on the bottom of their cage and how badly they reacted when the diapers were taken away. With a new monkey, Harlow wouldn’t put in a cloth diaper and “it would thrive poorly even though it received complete nutritional and medical care.” Whenever Harlow did put the diapers in, the monkey became happier and healthier.

Freud suggest that childhood experiences form the basis of the adult personality and therefore the mother’s status is ‘established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations’ (Freud, 1924).(www.sfeu.ac.uk) Ethological theories suggest that attachment is important because it ensures the infant’s survival by keeping it close to its caregiver. The mother is often the source of food, either as the lactating mammals, or in leading the young to, suitable sources nourishment. Being able to recognise the mother is therefore extremely important and has obvious evolutionary value. (www.sfeu.ac.uk) John Bowlby (1907-1990) was an innovator in the study of human attachment. Many of his studies found that many children who didn’t get certain needs met became

This article written by the University of Oregon explains in exquisite depth and detail the work of Harry Harlow, specifically his famous "Monkey Love Experiments." Harlow spent many years in his University of Wisconsin laboratory dedicating his life to conducting research on maternal deprivation in monkeys. His soul purpose for this experiment was to find the first "causes and mechanisms in the relationships formed between infants and mothers" ("Adoption"). Harlow conducted his experiments by separating two infant monkeys from their mothers soon after their birth and planned for them to be "raised" by two types of surrogate monkey

In Harlow’s experiment, they used monkeys to test whether attachment or nourishment was more important. Given that monkeys are more closely related to us humans, it makes sense to use them as an example (although, I don’t promote animal abuse). The experiment was composed of two models of object that would appear as a monkey to be a mother. The first model of monkey was made of wired but contained a milk bottle. The second monkey included a cloth for comfort but did not contain a milk bottle. When they released a young monkey by giving him a choice to choose between the two, the monkey spent more time with the cloth monkey. Although, the wired mother provided food, the cloth mother provided comfort, which was more important to the young monkey.