preview

Harry Harlow Research Papers

Decent Essays

The Well of Despair
Pragya Chaturvedi
Piedmont Governor’s School for Mathematics, Science, and Technology

The Well of Despair
Harry Harlow conducted experiments on rhesus monkeys to research the nature of maternal love (“Harry Harlow,” 2017). He used maternal deprivation and social isolation experiments to do so. The first experiment he conducted was to find out what kind of maternal care the monkeys needed to be normal; Harlow raised the infant monkeys with artificial mothers to see how different types of mothers would affect the monkeys’ growth and reaction. He used a variety of mothers to research the different preferences, and he thought that the ideal mother was "a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available 24 hours a day" (Slater, 2008, n.pag.). He used two mothers in this experiment: one was made out of terrycloth and the other one was made out of wire (“Harry Harlow,” 2017). The wire mother provided the monkeys with the materials the babies needed to survive, like milk and food. On …show more content…

He used equipment like the “rape rack,” “iron maidens,” and “the well of despair” which caused emotional trauma to the infants (“Harry Harlow,” 2017). “Rape rack” was a forced mating device; the mothers who had their baby using this device were abusive to their children. These mothers were unable to form any kind of bond to their children because they were deprived of that themselves. “Iron maidens” were the surrogate mothers that tormented the monkeys by shooting sharp spikes, and cold air that was so forceful that the monkeys were thrown across the cages, clinging and screaming (Slater, 2004). Lastly, “well of despair” was where the monkeys were left in dark chambers for up to a year (“Harry Harlow,” 2017). The infants that were left in isolation were very disturbed. Harlow tried very hard to reverse the depression using multiple kinds of therapy, but they all failed to

Get Access