Harry Harlow facts for kids

Monkey clinging to the cloth mother surrogate in fear test

Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Harlow as the 26th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Biography

Harry Harlow was born on October 31, 1905, to Mabel Rock and Alonzo Harlow Israel. Harlow was born and raised in Fairfield, Iowa, the third of four brothers. Little is known of Harlow's early life, but in an unfinished autobiography he recollected that his mother was cold to him and he experienced bouts of depression throughout his life. After a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Harlow obtained admission to Stanford University through a special aptitude test. After a semester as an English major with nearly disastrous grades, he declared himself as a psychology major.

Harlow attended Stanford in 1924, and subsequently became a graduate student in psychology, working directly under Calvin Perry Stone, a well-known animal behaviorist, and Walter Richard Miles, a vision expert, who were all supervised by Lewis Terman. Harlow studied largely under Terman, the developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, and Terman helped shape Harlow's future. After receiving a PhD in 1930, Harlow changed his name from Israel to Harlow. The change was made at Terman's prompting for fear of the negative consequences of having a seemingly Jewish last name, even though his family was not Jewish.

Directly after completing his doctoral dissertation, Harlow accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Harlow was unsuccessful in persuading the Department of Psychology to provide him with adequate laboratory space. As a result, Harlow acquired a vacant building down the street from the university, and, with the assistance of his graduate students, renovated the building into what later became known as the Primate Laboratory, one of the first of its kind in the world. Under Harlow's direction, it became a place of cutting-edge research at which some 40 students earned their PhDs.

Harlow received numerous awards and honors, including election to the United States National Academy of Sciences (1951), the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (1956), election to the American Philosophical Society (1957), the National Medal of Science (1967), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), and the Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation (1973). He served as head of the Human Resources Research branch of the Department of the Army from 1950 to 1952, head of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council from 1952 to 1955, consultant to the Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and president of the American Psychological Association from 1958 to 1959.

Harlow married his first wife, Clara Mears, in 1932. One of the select students with an IQ above 150 whom Terman studied at Stanford, Clara was Harlow's student before becoming romantically involved with him. The couple had two children together, Robert and Richard. Harlow and Mears divorced in 1946. That same year, Harlow married child psychologist Margaret Kuenne. They had two children together, Pamela and Jonathan. Margaret died on 11 August 1971, after a prolonged struggle with cancer, with which she had been diagnosed in 1967. Her death led Harlow to depression once more, for which he was treated with electro-convulsive therapy. In March 1972, Harlow remarried Clara Mears. The couple lived together in Tucson, Arizona, until Harlow's death in 1981.

Monkey studies

Harlow came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1930 after obtaining his doctorate under the guidance of several distinguished researchers, including Calvin Stone and Lewis Terman, at Stanford University. He began his career with nonhuman primate research. He worked with the primates at Henry Vilas Zoo, where he developed the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus (WGTA) to study learning, cognition, and memory. It was through these studies that Harlow discovered that the monkeys he worked with were developing strategies for his tests. What would later become known as learning sets, Harlow described as "learning to learn."

Harlow exclusively used rhesus macaques in his experiments.

In order to study the development of these learning sets, Harlow needed access to developing primates, so he established a breeding colony of rhesus macaques in 1932. Due to the nature of his study, Harlow needed regular access to infant primates and thus chose to rear them in a nursery setting, rather than with their protective mothers. This alternative rearing technique, also called maternal deprivation, is highly controversial to this day, and is used, in variants, as a model of early life adversity in primates.

"Nature of love" wire and cloth mother surrogates

Research with and caring for infant rhesus monkeys further inspired Harlow, and ultimately led to some of his best-known experiments: the use of surrogate mothers. Although Harlow, his students, contemporaries, and associates soon learned how to care for the physical needs of their infant monkeys, the nursery-reared infants remained very different from their mother-reared peers. Psychologically speaking, these infants were slightly strange: they were reclusive, had definite social deficits, and clung to their cloth diapers. At the same time in the reverse configuration, babies that had grown up with only a mother and no playmates showed signs of fear or aggressiveness.

Noticing their attachment to the soft cloth of their diapers and the psychological changes that correlated with the absence of a maternal figure, Harlow sought to investigate the mother–infant bond. This relationship was under constant scrutiny in the early twentieth century, as B. F. Skinner and the behaviorists took on John Bowlby in a discussion of the mother's importance in the development of the child, the nature of their relationship, and the impact of physical contact between mother and child.

To investigate the debate, Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the rhesus infants from wire and wood. Eventually, Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother–infant relationship than milk, and that "contact comfort" was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the importance of love and mother–child interaction.

Successive experiments concluded that infants used the surrogate as a base for exploration, and a source of comfort and protection in novel and even frightening situations. Another conclusion, which is still widely accepted, was that a lack of contact comfort is psychologically stressful to the monkeys, and the digestive problems are a physiological manifestation of that stress.

The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the traditional pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children, and the insistence of the predominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Feeding was thought to be the most important factor in the formation of a mother–child bond. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother–child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea was revolutionary at the time in provoking thoughts and values concerning the studies of love.

Some of Harlow's final experiments explored social deprivation in the quest to create an animal model for the study of depression. This study is the most controversial, and involved isolation of infant and juvenile macaques for various periods of time. Monkeys placed in isolation exhibited social deficits when introduced or re-introduced into a peer group. They appeared unsure of how to interact with their conspecifics, and mostly stayed separate from the group, demonstrating the importance of social interaction and stimuli in forming the ability to interact with conspecifics in developing monkeys, and, comparatively, in children.

Critics of Harlow's research 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, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.

Harlow first reported the results of these experiments in "The Nature of Love", the title of his address to the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C., August 31, 1958.

Partial and total isolation of infant monkeys

Beginning in 1959, Harlow and his students began publishing their observations on the effects of partial and total social isolation. Partial isolation involved raising monkeys in bare wire cages that allowed them to see, smell, and hear other monkeys, but provided no opportunity for physical contact. Total social isolation involved rearing monkeys in isolation chambers that precluded any and all contact with other monkeys.

Harlow et al. reported that partial isolation resulted in various abnormalities such as blank staring and stereotyped repetitive circling in their cages. These monkeys were then observed in various settings. For the study, some of the monkeys were kept in solitary isolation for 15 years.

In the total isolation experiments, baby monkeys would be left alone for three, six, 12, or 24 months of "total social deprivation". The experiments produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed.

Harlow tried to reintegrate the monkeys who had been isolated for six months by placing them with monkeys who had been raised normally. The rehabilitation attempts met with limited success. Harlow wrote that total social isolation for the first six months of life produced "severe deficits in virtually every aspect of social behavior". Isolates exposed to monkeys the same age who were reared normally "achieved only limited recovery of simple social responses". Some monkey mothers reared in isolation exhibited "acceptable maternal behavior when forced to accept infant contact over a period of months, but showed no further recovery". Isolates given to surrogate mothers developed "crude interactive patterns among themselves". Opposed to this, when six-month isolates were exposed to younger, three-month-old monkeys, they achieved "essentially complete social recovery for all situations tested". The findings were confirmed by other researchers, who found no difference between peer-therapy recipients and mother-reared infants, but found that artificial surrogates had very little effect.

Since Harlow's pioneering work on touch, recent researches have found evidence to support that touch during infancy is very important to health and touch deprivation can be harmful.

Timeline

Early papers

• The effect of large cortical lesions on learned behavior in monkeys. Science. 1950.
• Retention of delayed responses and proficiency in oddity problems by monkeys with preoccipital ablations. Am J Psychol. 1951.
• Discrimination learning by normal and brain operated monkeys. J Genet Psychol. 1952.
• Incentive size, food deprivation, and food preference. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1953.
• Effect of cortical implantation of radioactive cobalt on learned behavior of rhesus monkeys. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1955.
• The effects of repeated doses of total-body x radiation on motivation and learning in rhesus monkeys. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1956.
• The sad ones: Studies in depression "Psychology Today". 1971

See also

In Spanish: Harry Harlow para niños