harlow

• Studied rhesus monkeys 

  16 monkeys were taken from their biological mother and put in a cage with surrogate mothers. Surrogate mothers were either wired or wrapped in a soft cloth, and either provided milk or did not.
• Results: infant monkeys consistently preferred cloth mother to the wire mother, even if the cloth mother did not provide milk, and so spent more time with them. Those monkeys with cloth mothers also faced novel situations much better than those with just wired mothers, often using their cloth mother as a safe base to explore and they would return to it and be comforted by it when frightened. 

  Monkeys without surrogate mothers showed signs of stress-related illness
• Conclusions: Rejects the ‘cupboard’ love theory of attachment, stating that individuals form attachments to those that provide comfort rather than those that simply provided food.  This is innate.
• + real-life implications, show cased how important physical contact is in the healthy psychological development of infants, it led to changes in hospitals and orphanages, where physical contact was prioritised in order to ensure healthy development. 
• -ethical concerns – put monkeys under intentional high levels of stress, with long-term impacts on the development of the monkeys. They had abnormal sexual behaviour, and struggled to properly parent any offspring they had. However cost-benefit analysis -> was the positive contribution of this research via the real- life implications worth the suffering of these monkeys? 
• -animal studies are difficult to generalise to humans, as humans are qualitatively different.
• Harlow’s research has had important implications in many practical contexts. For example, it has helped social workers to understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse and to identify appropriate

  interventions. It also highlighted the importance of emotional care in children’s hospitals, homes and day care centre. It has also

  highlighted the importance of attachment figures for monkeys in zoos and breeding programmes in the wild. However, the extent to which we can generalise Harlow’s findings and conclusion from monkeys to humans is questionable. While all mammals share some common attachment behaviours, the human brain and human behaviour is still more complex than that of monkeys. This therefore means that it may not be appropriate to generalise Harlow’s findings to humans, reducing their practical applications in this respect
• Furthermore, Harlow’s research raises significant ethical issues as it caused severe short and long-term distress to the

  monkeys that were used. The isolation had clear long-lasting negative effects on the monkeys, such as having difficulty mating in later life and struggling with parenting, to the extent that they harmed or even killed their offspring. It could therefore be argued that this level of harm to the animals was unacceptable, particularly if, as has been suggested, the extent to which we can generalise from monkeys to human attachment processes is limited.