harlow monkey

• harlow research ↓

  - one of the most important animal research into understanding attachment

  - worked with rhesus monkeys which were much more similar to humans than lorenz birds
• mportance of contact comfort : procedure ↓

  - Harlow (1958) it's an idea that soft objects serve some of the functions of a mother

  - he read 16 baby monkeys with two wire surrogate/ model mothers

  - one condition: milk was given by the plain wire mother

  - second condition; milk was given from the cloth covered mother
• - importance of contact comfort : findings ↓

  - regardless of which mother (cloth or wire) was giving out milk

  - the baby monkeys cuddled to the cloth wired mother in preference to the plain wired mother

  - they went to the cloth wired mother for comfort when they were frightened e.g noise

  - Shows that contact comfort was more important to monkeys than food when it came to attachment behavior
• maternally deprived monkeys as adults (1/2)↓

  • harlow and Co also followed the monkeys who had been deprived from a real mother into adulthood to see if early maternal deprivation had a permanent effect
  • the researchers found monkeys reared only from the plain wired mothers where the most dysfunctional
  • those weird with a cloth covered mother didn't develop normal social behaviour
• maternally deprived monkeys as adults (2/2)↓

  • These deprived monkeys were more aggressive, less sociable and often bred less often than typical monkeys – as they were less skilled at mating
  • When deprived monkeys became mothers, they neglected their young and attacked their children.
• the critical period for normal development ↓

  - so he conducted that there was a critical period for attachment formation

  - a mother figure had to be introduced to a young monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form

  - after this attachment was impossible - damage done by early deprivation became irreversible
• ao3 real world value ↓

  - help social workers and clinical psychologists understand the lack of bonding experience may be risk factor in the child development- allows them to help prevent poor outcomes (Howe 1998)

  - now who understand the importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programs in the wild

  - ... means that the value of harlow's research is practical as well as theoretical
• - ao3 cant generalise findings from monkeys to humans ↓

  - rhesus monkeys are more similar to humans than birds and mammals share some common attachment behaviours

  - the human brain and human behaviour is more complex than monkeys