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Harry Harlow

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Harry Israel was born in Fairfield, a small town in Iowa. He was the third of four boys and grew up in a family that placed a top quality on the value of education. When he completed his bachelor and doctoral degrees at Stanford University, his advisor convinced Harry to change his surname from Israel to Harlow because of the concern of possible discrimination of his last name. In 1930, Harlow began work as a comparative psychologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and remained there for his entire career. Among many honors, Harlow was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and received the National Medal of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. Harlow is most famous for his work with rhesus monkeys. After studying how to decrease the spread of disease, especially tuberculosis, in animal colonies, Harlow observed the infant monkeys’ unusual behavior that had followed separation from their mothers. This sparked his exploration of affection. Harlow was one of the first researchers to study love scientifically. The misconception that children only needed necessities like food and cleanliness was at its peak in the 60’s. But Harlow was ready to disprove this notion. When separated from their mothers, infant rhesus monkeys exhibit behaviors including emotional discomfort and withdrawal as well as atypical sexual and social behaviors. However, these monkeys seemed to become attached to cloth covered blocks of wood or wire items that provided sustenance, like milk, in their cage.
Contact comfort was a phrase first coined by Harlow to describe the fact that the infants clung to cloth surrogate mothers placed in their cage, particularly during times of distress, rather than to nourishing wire surrogates. The results of Harlow's studies supported the work of ethological attachment theorists such as John Bowlby who held that attachment relationships are primary, not secondary, to the food that primates' mothers provide to their young, as psychoanalytics and behaviorists once believed.
In the total isolation experiments baby monkeys would be left alone for 3, six, 12, or 24 months of "total social deprivation." The experiments produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed.
Harlow wrote:
“No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by ... autistic self-clutching and rocking. One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia. ... The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially …”
Harlow tried to reintegrate the monkeys who had been isolated for six months by placing them with monkeys who had been raised normally. The rehabilitation attempts met with limited success. Harlow wrote that total social isolation for the first six months of life produced "severe deficits in virtually every aspect of social behavior." Isolates exposed to monkeys the same age who were reared normally "achieved only limited recovery of simple social responses." Some monkey mothers reared in isolation exhibited "acceptable maternal behavior when forced to accept infant contact over a period of months, but showed no further recovery." Isolates given to surrogate mothers developed “crude interactive patterns among themselves.” Opposed to this, when six-month isolates were exposed to younger, three-month-old monkeys, they achieved “essentially complete social recovery for all situations tested.” The findings were confirmed by other researchers, who found no difference between peer-therapy recipients and mother-reared infants, but found that artificial surrogates had very little effect. (Suomi)
Harlow led psychology away from the paradigm of clinical sterility that had misguided a century of research into child-rearing. Given the tragic state of children in "scientifically informed" institutions, there can be no doubt that a great many lives were saved by the work of Harlow and his colleagues. The life-saving revelations came with a price: Harlow’s primate subjects were treated with extreme cruelty--not gratuitously, but by the very design of his experiments. (Karl Giberson) Apart from Harlow’s work his personal life consisted of two marriages and four children. His first marriage was with one of his students, Clara Mears. They were married in 1932 and had two children, Robert and Richard. Harlow and Mears divorced in 1946. That same year, Harlow married child psychologist Margaret Kuenne.
Margaret died in 1970 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. In 1971, Harlow remarried Clara Mears. The couple lived together in Tucson, Arizona until Harlow's death in 1981.
Harlow's ingenious work with infants and surrogate mothers had widespread impact, influencing attachment theorists and psychiatric treatments as well as the general scientific perception of affection. His own work and the research of his students have had a lasting impact on the field of psychology.
William Mason, one of Harlow's students who continued deprivation experiments after leaving Wisconsin, has said that Harlow "kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job." (Capitanio)

Bibliography
Blum, D. (2002). Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the science of affection. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
Harlow, H. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13, 673-685. Available from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm
Schillinger, Liesl. "Please Pass the Baby." The New York Times Book Review 28 Mar. 2010: 12(L). General OneFile. Web. 7 Nov. 2012.

Giberson, Karl W. "The greatest of these." Books & Culture July-Aug. 2005: 24. Literature Resource Center. Web. 7 Nov. 2012.

Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love." Publishers Weekly 14 May 2007: 37+. General OneFile. Web. 7 Nov. 2012.
1976 Suomi SJ, Delizio R, Harlow HF. "Social rehabilitation of separation-induced depressive disorders in monkeys."
McKinney, William T. (2003). Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 2254-2255
Blum, Deborah. Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. Perseus Publishing, 2002, p. 225.
Capitanio, J.P. & Mason, W.A. "Cognitive style: problem solving by rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) reared with living or inanimate substitute mothers", California Regional Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis. 1: J Comp Psychol. 2000 Jun;114(2):115-25

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