Harry Harlow

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Harry Harlow
Born	(1905-10-31)October 31, 1905  Fairfield, Iowa, U.S.
Died	December 6, 1981(1981-12-06) (aged 76)
Nationality	United States
Awards	National Medal of Science (1967), Gold Medal from American Psychological Foundation (1973), Howard Crosby Warren Medal (1956), several others
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology

Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905–December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of tangible affection in social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked for a time with humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow.

Harlow's experiments were controversial. Harlow and his research were influential to many in the animal rights movement. Deborah Blum's "The Monkey Wars" describes the influence of Harlow's research on the burgeoning animal rights movement and subsequent improvement of research animal treatment. ^[1]

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Born Harry Israel on Halloween night, 1905 to Mabel Rock and Alonzo Harlow Israel, Harlow grew up, largely, in Fairfield, Iowa, the second youngest of four brothers. Early in his education, he demonstrated special aptitudes in several facets, most notably English and the visual arts^{[citation needed]}. Although he graduated 13th out of a class of 71, he scored two standard deviations higher on an aptitude test, created by the University of Iowa, than his nearest competitor^{[citation needed]}. After a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Harlow achieved admission to Stanford University on a special aptitude test. After a semester as an English major with near disastrous grades, he redeclared himself as a psychology major.

An example of Harlow's poetry^{[This quote needs a citation]}:

Apathetic Annie was complacent and serene

Though suffering from paresis,

Consummation and gangrene

But Annie did not really care

Though life was nearly gone

For Annie had a tumor in the diencephalon

Harlow largely studied under Lewis Terman, the developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test. Terman shaped Harlow's future to a large extent. After he received a Ph.D. in 1930, he changed his name from Israel to Harlow. Although Harlow's family was not Jewish, the unjust reality of America in the early part of the 20th Century would have served to preclude a professorship on account of his name. It is commonly thought that Terman was responsible for the enaction of this change, but, in reality, it was probably the result of Harlow's intense drive.

Directly after his doctoral dissertation, Harlow was offered and accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There he built the new, feeble Department of Psychology into a thriving, world-renowned organization^{[citation needed]}. In terms of departmental development, his most significant achievement was his persuasion of the University to construct the esteemed Primate Laboratory, one of the first of its kind in the World. It was and is a vicinity of cutting-edge research at which some 40 students earned their Ph.D.'s under Harlow's direction.

Harlow received numerous awards and honors, including the National Medal of Science (1967), Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation (1973), and the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (1956). He served as Head of Human Resources Research Branch of Department of Army from 1950-1952, Head of Division of Anthropology and Psychology of National Research Council from 1952-1955, a Consultant to Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and as the President of the American Psychological Association from 1958-1959.

Harlow's personal life was complicated, and at times, chaotic. He first married to Clara Mears in 1932. One of the select children with an IQ above 150 whom Terman studied at Stanford, Clara was Harlow's student before becoming romantically involved with him. The couple had two children, Robert and Richard, and divorced in 1946. That same year, Harlow married child psychologist Margaret Kuenne. The marriage resulted in another two children, Pamela and Jonathan. Margaret died in 1970 after a prolonged struggle with cancer, and in 1971, Harlow remarried Clara Mears. The couple lived together in Tucson, Arizona until Harlow's death in 1981.

A Timeline:

• The effect of large cortical lesions on learned behavior in monkeys. Science. 1950.
• Retention of delayed responses and proficiency in oddity problems by monkeys with preoccipital ablations. Am J Psychol. 1951.
• Discrimination learning by normal and brain operated monkeys. J Genet Psychol. 1952.
• Incentive size, food deprivation, and food preference. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1953.
• Effect of cortical implantation of radioactive cobalt on learned behavior of rhesus monkeys. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1955.
• The effects of repeated doses of total-body x radiation on motivation and learning in rhesus monkeys. J Comp Physiol Psychol. 1956.

In a well-known series of experiments conducted between 1963 and 1968, Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, and offered them a choice between two surrogate "mothers," one made of terrycloth, the other of wire.

In the first group, the terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, the terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether it provided them with food or not, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.

Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreased as the monkeys grew older.

When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogates, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they would occasionally return to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They would freeze in fear and cry, crouch down, or suck their thumbs. Some of the monkeys would even run from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother.

Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods, they were separated from their cloth mothers for three days. When they were reunited with their mothers they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow claimed from this that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore.

The study found that monkeys who were raised with either a wire mother or a cloth mother gained weight at the same rate. However, the monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhea more frequently. Harlow interpreted this to mean that not having contact comfort was psychologically stressful to the monkeys.

Critics of Harlow's claims have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimated the importance of contact comfort and underestimated the importance of nursing. ^[2]

Harlow first reported the results of these experiments in "The nature of love," the title of his address to the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D. C., August 31, 1958. The studies were motivated by John Bowlby's World Health Organization-sponsored study and report, "Maternal Care and Mental Health" in 1950, in which Bowlby reviewed previous surveys of the effects of institutionalization on child development such as René Spitz's^[3] and conducted his own surveys on children raised in a variety of settings. In 1953, his colleague, James Robertson, produced a short and controversial documentary film titled A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital demonstrating the almost immediate effects of maternal separation. Bowlby's report, coupled with Robertson's film, demonstrated the importance of the primary caregiver in human and non-human primate development.

From around 1960 onwards, Harlow and his students began publishing their observations on the effects of partial and total social isolation. Partial isolation involved raising monkeys in bare wire cages that allowed them to see, smell, and hear other monkeys, but provided no opportunity for physical contact. Total social isolation involved rearing monkeys in isolation chambers that precluded any and all contact with other monkeys.

Harlow et al reported that partial isolation resulted in various abnormalities such as blank staring, stereotyped repetitive circling in their cages, and self-mutilation. These monkeys were then observed in various settings. Some of the monkeys remained in solitary confinement for 15 years.^[4]

In the total isolation experiments baby monkeys would be left alone for three, six, 12, or 24^[5][6] 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 ...^[7]

Harlow tried to reintegrate the monkeys who had been isolated for six months by placing them with monkeys who had been reared normally.^[8][9] 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."^[10] Isolates exposed to monkeys the same age who were reared normally "achieved only limited recovery of simple social responses."^[10] 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."^[10] Isolates given to surrogate mothers developed "crude interactive patterns among themselves."^[10] 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."^[11] 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.^[12]

Harlow was well known for refusing to use conventional terminology, and instead choosing deliberately outrageous terms for the experimental apparatus he devised. The tendency is spawned from an early conflict with the conventional psychological movement in which Harlow used the term "love" in place of the popular and archaically correct term, "attachment." Such terms and respective devices including a forced mating device he called the "rape rack," tormenting surrogate mother devices he called "Iron maiden," and an isolation chamber he called the "pit of despair" developed by him and a graduate student, Steven Suomi, now director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Comparative Ethology Laboratory, at the National Institutes of Health.

In the latter of these devices, alternatively called the "well of despair," baby monkeys were left alone in darkness for up to one year from birth, or repetitively separated from their peers and isolated in the chamber. These procedures quickly produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed and declared to be valuable models of human depression.^[13]

Harlow tried to rehabilitate monkeys that had been subjected to varying degrees of isolation using various forms of therapy. "In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity." (p.458)^[14]

The experiments delivered what science writer Deborah Blum has called "common sense results": that monkeys, very social animals in nature, when placed in isolation emerge badly damaged, and that some recover and some do not. ^[15]

Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was one of Harlow's doctoral students, has stated that he believes the animal liberation movement in the U.S. was born as a result of Harlow's experiments.^[15]

Willam Mason, another of Harlow's students who continued ^[16] 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." ^[1]

• The Nature of Love (1958) - Harry Harlow, American Psychologist, 13, 573-685
• Harry Harlow: Monkey Love Experiments - Adoption History
• Harry Harlow - A Science Odyssey: People and Experiments
• Harlow et al. "Total social isolation in monkeys." Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1965 July; 54(1): 90–97.
• Film footage of Harry Harlow - demonstrates his wire mother and cloth mother experiment
• "A History of Primate Experimentation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison".
• Blum, Deborah. Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. Perseus Publishing, 2002. ISBN 0-7382-0278-9
• Blum, Deborah. The Inventor of the Cloth Mother An article about Harry Harlow.