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The pit of despair was a name used by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow for a device he designed, technically called a vertical chamber apparatus, that he used in experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s. [2] The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of depression.
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.
In 1960, Harry Harlow began studying partial and total isolation of infant monkeys by raising them in cages. Partial isolation involved raising monkeys in bare wire cages that allowed them to see, smell, and hear other monkeys, but did not give them the opportunity for physical contact.
Harlow likened this behavior to catatonic schizophrenia. [38] Later experiments were devised to test the mother-child bond with mothers who had themselves been reared in isolation as infants. This early deprivation was found to have retarded the mothers' emotional development and her ability to engage in intercourse and in turn become pregnant.
The Wisconsin General Test Apparatus was created in the 1930s at the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. [2] The development of the device is credited to Drs. Paul Settlage and Walter Grether, and Drs.Harry Harlow and John Bromer are credited with the first publication about the device in 1938, where it gained much notoriety. [2]
Harlow exclusively used rhesus macaques in his experiments. When this study was conducted in 1957, Harry Harlow was questioning current theories about dependency and love. At this time, Harlow and his team stated that love began developing as a feeding bond between an infant and its mother; this notion applied to family members, as well.
Inspired by Harry Harlow's famous experiments on rhesus monkeys, which established a link between neurotic behavior and isolation from a care-giving mother, Prescott further proposed that a key component to development comes from the somesthetic processes (body touch) and vestibular-cerebellar processes (body movement) induced by mother-child ...
More research was performed by Harry Harlow with monkeys. He utilized the strange situation to see if a monkey would go to a cloth mother or a mother that offers food to the baby. The baby monkey would choose to snuggle up to the cloth mother and felt secure.