HARRY HARLOW

About Harry Harlow Harry Frederick Harlow: Born: on the 31st of October 1905 Nationality: United states Married: Margret Kuenne Fields: psychologist Notable awards: gold medal from American psychological foundation- 1973 Howard Crosby warren medal- 1956 Died: December 6th 1981 aged 76

What he did Harry Harlow was a psychologist who was well known for his maternal- separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys. He raised rhesus monkeys from birth. He would put the monkeys into a cage with two manmade substitute mothers one of them was made by wire and the other one was covered by a towel. Half of the monkeys where fed by the wire mother and the other half where fed by the cloth mother. They found regardless of which monkey was feeding them the monkeys attached themselves to the cloth mother. They turned up to the cloth one when they where frightened for comfort. The study showed that providing food alone doesn’t mean that attachments will be formed.

In a development of this study Harlow worked with Rosenblum and they looked at what would happen if the cloth mothers would reject the monkey. They done this by splitting the monkeys into two groups one group was were randomly blasted with compressed air by the cloth mother and the other group wasn’t. They found out that the monkeys in the 1st group tended to spend more time clinging to the cloth mother and the 2nd group didn’t. This shows that rejection and abuse made the monkeys insecure and made them try more often to gain some comfort from the mother even though there was a chance that they would get rejected again.

Margret and Harry Harlow carried on the theory of John Bowlby he found out that contact comfort or affection is very important to the development of a bond of attachment and that the adults demonstration of physical affection is crucial to this. The experiment of Margret and Harry Harlow with the baby rhesus monkeys during the 1960’s and 1970’s demonstrated that the theory that contact comfort was more important than feeding and nurturing emotional development. They found this out by using the two different mothers the wire one and the cloth one to see which one they preferred. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsA5Sec6dAI