Harlow

• Procedure, placed 8 solitary rhesus monkeys in a cage, separated from birth and raised in isolation with two 'surrogate' mothers, one of wire one of cloth, for half the feeding tube was with the wire and for the other half it was the cloth mother, they measured the amount of time they spent clinging to each mother and which they went to when scared.
• Findings- irrelevant of which surrogate provided milk they spent the most time with the cloth mother. monkeys showed psychological problems such as rocking, aggression, abnormal sexual behaviour, neglected their own babies later in life.
• Conclusion- attachment is for comfort not food and maternal deprivation has devastating consequences,
• monkeys spent more time with soft towel mother regardless of whether it produced milk or not
• monkeys with only wire mother exhibited psychological signs of distress such as diarrhoea
• harlow removed infant rhesus monkeys shorlty after their birth and placed them in a cage with surrogate mothers, one surrogate mother provided milk but not comfort, as its body was constructed of exposed wire; the other surrogate mother provided comfort as the wire was covered in a cloth, the cloth mother did not provide food, time spent with the mother was recorded, as well as which surrogate the infant ran to when frightened by a mechanical monkey
• when the monkeys were frightened with a stimulus (mechanical monkey) provided by Harlow, they would run to the cloth mother, and monkeys without access to a cloth mother showed signs of stress-related illness,
• Harlows findings influential- Bowlby argued similar to monkeys- infants crave contact from mothers, attempting to form a monotropy. If this fails, then Bowlby claims that human infants will grow into adults with poor socialisation, similar to the monkeys without a cloth mother
• ethical issues- as well as causing harm to the macaques/monkeys, the research also damages psychology's reputation,