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Much of Harlow's scientific career was spent studying maternal bonding, what he described as the "nature of love".These experiments involved rearing newborn "total isolates" and monkeys with surrogate mothers, ranging from toweling-covered cones to a machine that modeled abusive mothers by assaulting the baby monkeys with cold air or spikes.
Monkey clinging to the cloth mother surrogate in fear test. Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.
Harlow, being fascinated with the concept of love and nurturing, worked with monkeys to test these theories. (Berger, 2005) In Harlow's monkey experiment, newborn monkeys were separated from their mothers almost immediately after birth. They were then raised with substitute "mothers" made of either (1) wire or (2) wood covered with a soft cloth.
In Harry Harlow's experiment he separated infant monkeys from their mothers 6–12 hours after birth and raised them in a laboratory, isolated from humans and other monkeys. In each cage these infant monkeys had two "mothers."
The effects of developmental homeostasis were demonstrated in an experiment conducted in 1966 by Margaret and Harry Harlow. They wanted to test what the consequences of infant rhesus monkeys would be from being separated from their mothers and having little interaction with other monkeys.
Subsequent experiments would study the effects of total and partial isolation on the animals' mental health and interpersonal bonding using a stainless steel vertical chamber designed by Harlow, named the "pit of despair", which was found to produce "profound and prolonged depression" in monkeys. Similarly, Harlow found that extended isolation ...
The formal origin of attachment theory can be traced to the publication of two 1958 papers, one being Bowlby's The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother, in which the precursory concepts of "attachment" were introduced, and Harry Harlow's The Nature of Love, based on the results of experiments which showed, approximately, that infant rhesus ...
Harlow's research on monkeys shows that infant monkeys form attachment bonds even with abusive mothers (in the experimental setup, the abusive 'mother' was a monkey made out of fabric who delivered mild shocks to the infant monkey or flung the infant monkey across the arena). These findings also apply to human attachment bonds.