baby raised with monkey experiment

This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same Way to See What Would Happen

When treated as a human, the baby chimp acted like one—until her physiology and development held her back

Rachel Nuwer

On June 26, 1931, comparative psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife welcomed a new arrival home: not a human infant, but a baby chimpanzee. The couple planned to raise the chimp, Gua, alongside their own baby boy, Donald. As later described in the  Psychological Record , the idea was to see how environment influenced development. Could a chimp grow up to behave like a human? Or even think it was a human? 

Since his student days, Kellogg had dreamed of conducting such an experiment. He was fascinated by wild children, or those raised with no human contact, often in nature. Abandoning a human child in the wilderness would be ethically reprehensible, Kellogg knew, so he opted to experiment on the reverse scenario—bringing an infant animal into civilization. 

For the next nine months, for 12 hours a day and seven days a week, Kellogg and his wife conducted tireless tests on Donald and Gua.

They raised the two babies in exactly the same way, in addition to conducting an exhaustive list of scientific experiments that included subjects such as "blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span and others," the  Psychological Record authors note.

For a while, Gua actually excelled at these tests compared to Donald.

But eventually,  as  NPR notes , Gua hit a cognitive wall: No amount of training or nurturing could overcome the fact that, genetically, she was a chimpanzee. As such, the Psychological Record  authors write, the Kelloggs' experiment "probably succeeded better than any study before its time in demonstrating the limitations heredity placed on an organism regardless of environmental opportunities as well as the developmental gains that could be made in enriched environments."

The experiment, however, ended rather abruptly and mysteriously. As the Psychological Record  authors describe: 

Our final concern is why the project ended when it did. We are told only that the study was terminated on March 28, 1932, when Gua was returned to the Orange Park primate colony through a gradual rehabilitating process. But as for why, the Kelloggs, who are so specific on so many other points, leave the reader wondering. 

It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua's chimp noises. "In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study," the authors write.

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Rachel Nuwer | | READ MORE

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.

Harlow’s Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact

• Child Development
• Cognitive Psychology
• Infant Development
• Social Interaction
• Social Isolation
• Social Psychology

Harry Harlow’s empirical work with primates is now considered a “classic” in behavioral science, revolutionizing our understanding of the role that social relationships play in early development. In the 1950s and 60s, psychological research in the United States was dominated by behaviorists and psychoanalysts, who supported the view that babies became attached to their mothers because they provided food. Harlow and other social and cognitive psychologists argued that this perspective overlooked the importance of comfort, companionship, and love in promoting healthy development.

Using methods of isolation and maternal deprivation, Harlow showed the impact of contact comfort on primate development. Infant rhesus monkeys were taken away from their mothers and raised in a laboratory setting, with some infants placed in separate cages away from peers. In social isolation, the monkeys showed disturbed behavior, staring blankly, circling their cages, and engaging in self-mutilation. When the isolated infants were re-introduced to the group, they were unsure of how to interact — many stayed separate from the group, and some even died after refusing to eat.

Even without complete isolation, the infant monkeys raised without mothers developed social deficits, showing reclusive tendencies and clinging to their cloth diapers. Harlow was interested in the infants’ attachment to the cloth diapers, speculating that the soft material may simulate the comfort provided by a mother’s touch. Based on this observation, Harlow designed his now-famous surrogate mother experiment.

In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. The infants were assigned to one of two conditions. In the first, the wire mother had a milk bottle and the cloth mother did not; in the second, the cloth mother had the food while the wire mother had none.

In both conditions, Harlow found that the infant monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry cloth mother than they did with the wire mother. When only the wire mother had food, the babies came to the wire mother to feed and immediately returned to cling to the cloth surrogate.

Harlow’s work showed that infants also turned to inanimate surrogate mothers for comfort when they were faced with new and scary situations. When placed in a novel environment with a surrogate mother, infant monkeys would explore the area, run back to the surrogate mother when startled, and then venture out to explore again. Without a surrogate mother, the infants were paralyzed with fear, huddled in a ball sucking their thumbs. If an alarming noise-making toy was placed in the cage, an infant with a surrogate mother present would explore and attack the toy; without a surrogate mother, the infant would cower in fear.

Together, these studies produced groundbreaking empirical evidence for the primacy of the parent-child attachment relationship and the importance of maternal touch in infant development. More than 70 years later, Harlow’s discoveries continue to inform the scientific understanding of the fundamental building blocks of human behavior.

Harlow H. F., Dodsworth R. O., & Harlow M. K. (1965). Total social isolation in monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC285801/pdf/pnas00159-0105.pdf

Suomi, S. J., & Leroy, H. A. (1982). In memoriam: Harry F. Harlow (1905–1981). American Journal of Primatology, 2 , 319–342. doi:10.1002/ajp.1350020402

Tavris, C. A. (2014). Teaching contentious classics. The Association for Psychological Science . Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/teaching-contentious-classics

Loved the simplicity of article but wanted to Apa cite it but didn’t see a name who wrote it

typed a partial comment and was disrupted and never got around to sending it. I tried to relocate it on my computer, but was not able. Could have been my thoughts. As a substitute teacher I see the results of giving a child a phone rather than giving a child love and all that goes with it. I see the predictions of Harry Harlow have come to pass. No absolutes, no positive examples, no investment of time, just looking for the allusive moment of quality time, that requires an investment TIME to be there for that moment in time. Any way I’m probably not the one you’re looking for.

The above summary fails to address any critique of Harlow’s legacy. Nothing about use of Harlow’s “pit of despair,” or his “rape rack” to use his own term? Nothing about beginning “his harsher isolation and depression experiments while “corrosively depressed” and “stumbling around drunk”? No concern about any possibility of sadism as “science”? No question of “how much suffering is justified by the imperatives of science”? For starters, see S. Hansen’s 11/13/2002 salon.com review of Deborah Blum’s Love at Goon Park, or the essay on Harlow in psychologist Loren Slater’s book, Opening Skinner’s Box.

Gigi, the sole reason for the experiment was not to root out sadism, it was to explain the need for attachment. Sorry about the special feelings you have for animals. It is a good point you let us see, you can now use that opportunity to show us sadism in regards to the research they made. I will search that article you point out to see what that author had to say about sadism.

I read these these experiments when they were published in the Scientific American journals.

I find he article a good review of the original work.

I worked in Harlow’s lab as as an undergraduate student in 1951/52. What I learned from this experience is the value of facts and verified statements about animal behavior. As a 20 year old kid discharged from the army, I was severely reprimanded for stating that a monkey had bit me in anger when I slapped its paw for trying to steal reasons out of lab coat. I was bitten but I invented the reason. Our work was to flesh out the phylo-genetic scale. Along with just learning studies, with white rats as well.

And what did you discover?

Wow that’s amazing you worked in the lab, I think so just starting out in psychology and my first lesson was Harlow. It’s was very interesting learning about him, my only thought was the monkeys have to admit but that was done in those days. Thanks Sue

I agree that in this day and age, we would criticize this treatment. I have no doubt much of it still goes on, people still eat animals. That was a different time, we learn from the past so that we do not repeat it. But to be angry about the past or that someone could find the good research that was deemed from it is histrionic and a waste of positive energy.

Are you people insane? “I agree that in this day and age, we would criticize this treatment” I was raised in exactly in accord with Harlow’s experiments, denied human contact almost since birth. And you APPROVE of this?! “That was a different time, we learn from the past so that we do not repeat it.” Oh, you know so little. Look up “secure confinement” and consider what children face every day of their lives.

I agree with Harry’s theory.

I also find it sadistic or at least totally lacking in sensitivity and compassion to have torn these baby monkeys from their mothers to learn what.That they prefer warmth to a hard screen even when food is involved? It is this kind of thinking that leads to the willingness of politicians to separate families, putting children in cages so that they will be less likely to come to America for help. Truly sadistic!

I think we need like a chat forum for discussion about these issues honestly. I’d love to debate about this stuff actually and am wondering whether any means is sufficient. In regards to the actual experiment, Im not going to get my beliefs on ethical treatment mixed up and it did produce significant findings. I’m more upset about the actual findings themselves. It could also be because I see some very loose correlation between them and my life unfortunately. The published paper was definitely worth the read and I wish I didn’t.

I think the whole point is that the experiments show why politicians should NOT separate families etc.. it’s difficult to prove the effects of cruelty without being cruel. The alarming thing is how little has been learned from the sacrifice. I know a young woman with learning difficulties, abandonment issues and probable RAD who is in care. She has created a fantasy world with cuddly toys. She is chastised for this by her ‘carers’ who confiscate them and make her feel guilty about her self. I am currently composing a letter for social services to intervene. I intend enclosing the above article. Everyone who works in care should be made to read it!

I studied psychology as an undergrad several years ago, and of the cognitive development experiments that made it into academic text, Harlow’s was one that has always stuck in my mind. To refer to the outcomes and substantiated findings of studies such as these, without acknowledging the cruelty perpetuated in carrying them out, might be impossible. The two go hand in hand, and that’s the point. But years later, can we say the ends justified the means? Yes…and no. Studies such as this one, were done years ago, perhaps in a time with very different regulations; however, the findings are none the less very substantial. And, I personally believe could, and should, be referred to in the training of a variety of service and caregiver professions, as this last comment suggests. There is still much to be learned in Behavioral science area of study, but as a society in need of great change as a whole, we should be working to figure out how we can capitalize on the knowledge gained from past studies such as this one…as opposed to focusing solely on the conditions in which they were done in. That’s not to allow our emotions to diminish the importance of the findings, without putting them to good use in our everyday lives. The end goal being to make a positive difference in society moving forward.

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Harlow’s Monkey Experiments: 3 Findings About Attachment

When that need is met, the infant develops a secure attachment style; however, when that need is not met, the infant can develop an attachment disorder.

In this post, we’ll briefly explore attachment theory by looking at Harlow’s monkey experiments and how those findings relate to human behavior and attachment styles. We’ll also look at some of the broader research that resulted from Harlow’s experiments.

Before we begin, I have to warn you that Harlow’s experiments are distressing and can be upsetting. Nowadays, his experiments are considered unethical and would most likely not satisfy the requirements of an ethical board. However, knowing this, the findings of his research do provide insight into the important mammalian bond that exists between infant and parent.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients build healthy, life-enriching relationships.

This Article Contains:

Harlow’s experiments: a brief summary, three fascinating findings & their implications, its connection to love and attachment theory, follow-up and related experiments, criticisms of harlow’s experiments, ethical considerations of harlow’s experiments, relevant positivepsychology.com resources, a take-home message.

Harry Harlow was trained as a psychologist, and in 1930 he was employed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His areas of expertise were in infant–caregiver relationships, infant dependency and infant needs, and social deprivation and isolation. He is also well known for his research using rhesus monkeys.

Maternal surrogates: Food versus comfort

For his experiments, Harlow (1958) separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers. He then constructed two surrogate ‘mothers’ for the infants: one surrogate made out of metal but that provided milk through an artificial nipple, the other surrogate covered in soft, fluffy material but that didn’t offer food.

The first surrogate delivered food but provided no comfort; the second did not deliver food, but the rhesus infants were able to cuddle with it.

When both surrogates were placed in the infants’ cages, Harlow found the surrogates satisfied different needs of the rhesus infants. The wire surrogate satisfied the infants’ primary need for food. However, when Harlow made a loud noise to frighten the rhesus infants, they ran to the second, fluffy surrogate for comfort.

Maternal surrogates: A secure base from which to explore

In subsequent experiments, Harlow (1958) showed that the fluffy surrogate acted as a secure base from which rhesus infants could explore an unfamiliar environment or objects. In these experiments, the infants, along with their fluffy surrogates, were placed in an unfamiliar environment like a new cage.

These infants would explore the environment and return to the surrogate for comfort if startled. In contrast, when the infants were placed in the new environment without a surrogate, they would not explore but rather lie on the floor, paralyzed, rocking back and forth, sucking their thumbs.

The absence of a maternal surrogate

Harlow also studied the development of rhesus monkeys that were not exposed to a fluffy surrogate or had no surrogate at all. The outcome for these infants was extremely negative. Rhesus infants raised with a milk-supplying metal surrogate had softer feces than infants raised with a milk-supplying fluffy surrogate.

Harlow posited that the infants with the metal surrogates suffered from psychological disturbances, which manifested in digestive problems.

Rhesus infants raised with no surrogates showed the same fearful behavior when placed in an unfamiliar environment as described above, except that their behavior persisted even when a surrogate was placed in the environment with them. They also demonstrated less exploratory behavior and less curiosity than infants raised with surrogates from a younger age.

When these infants were approximately a year old, they were introduced to a surrogate. In response, they behaved fearfully and violently. They would rock continuously, scream, and attempt to escape their cages. Fortunately, these behaviors dissipated after a few days. The infants approached, explored, and clung to the surrogate, but never to the same extent as infants raised with a fluffy surrogate from a younger age.

Primary drives are ones that ensure a creature’s survival, such as the need for food or water. Harlow suggests that there is another drive, ‘contact comfort,’ which the fluffy surrogate satisfied.

The ‘contact comfort’ drive does more than just satisfy a need for love and comfort. From Harlow’s experiments, it seems that these fluffy surrogates offered a secure, comforting base from which infants felt confident enough to explore unfamiliar environments and objects, and to cope with scary sounds.

Conclusions from Harlow’s work were limited to the role of maternal surrogates because the surrogates also provided milk – a function that only female mammals can perform. Consequently, it was posited that human infants have a strong need to form an attachment to a maternal caregiver (Bowlby, 1951). However, subsequent research has shown that human infants do not only form an attachment with:

• a female caregiver,
• a caregiver that produces milk, or
• one caregiver (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964).

The bond between human infant and caregiver is not limited to only mothers, but can extend to anyone who spends time with the infant. Schaffer and Emerson (1964) studied the emotional responses of 60 infants to better understand their attachments and behaviors.

They found that at the start of the study, most of the infants had formed an attachment with a single person, normally the mother (71%), and that just over a third of the infants had formed attachments to multiple people, sometimes over five.

However, when the infants were 18 months, only 13% had an attachment to a single person, and most of the infants had two or more attachments. The other people with whom infants formed an attachment included:

• Grandparents
• Siblings and family members
• People who were not part of their family, including neighbors or other children

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Harlow’s experiment on rhesus monkeys shed light on the importance of the relationship between caregiver and infant. This relationship satisfies other needs besides food and thirst, and the behavior of rhesus infants differs depending on whether they were raised (1) with or without a surrogate and (2) whether that surrogate was a fluffy (i.e., comforting) or metal (i.e., non-comforting) one.

Widespread thinking at the time was that children only needed their physical needs to be satisfied in order to grow up into healthy, well-adjusted adults (Bowlby, 1951, 1958). Harlow’s work, however, suggests that the caregiver satisfies another need of the infant: the need for love.

It is difficult to know whether the infant monkeys truly loved the surrogate mothers because Harlow could not ask them directly or measure the feeling of love using equipment.

But there is no doubt that the presence (or absence) of a surrogate mother deeply affected the behavior of the infant monkeys, and monkeys with surrogate mothers displayed more normal behavior than those without.

Additionally, Harlow’s work also showed that infant monkeys looked for comfort in the fluffy surrogate mother, even if that surrogate mother never provided food.

From this research, we can conclude that infants feel an attachment toward their caregiver. That attachment is experienced as what we know to be ‘love.’ This attachment seems to be important for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Feeling safe when afraid or in an unfamiliar environment
• Responding in a loving, comforting way to the needs and feelings of infants

The infant’s need to form an attachment was not considered a primary need until 1952, when Bowlby argued that this basic need was one that infants feel instinctually (Bowlby & World Health Organization, 1952).

Bowlby’s work formed the basis of attachment theory – the theory that the relationship between infant and caregiver affects the infant’s psychological development.

The contributions from these researchers include:

• The emotional needs of infants are critical to healthy development and survival
• Parents play an important role besides merely satisfying the physical needs of an infant to ensure survival

Maternal deprivation

John Bowlby (1958) argued that maternal deprivation has extremely negative effects on the psychological and emotional development of children.

He was especially interested in extreme forms of parental deprivation, such as children who were homeless, abandoned, or institutionalized and therefore had no contact with their parents.

From his research, Bowlby argued that satisfying the physiological needs of the child did not ensure healthy development and that the effects of maternal deprivation were grave and difficult to reverse.

Specifically, he argued that how the caregiver behaves in response to the behavior and feelings of an infant plays an important role in infants’ psychological and emotional development (Bowlby, 1958).

Attachment styles in infants

How the caregiver responds to the infant is known as sensitive responsiveness (Ainsworth et al., 1978). The fluffy surrogate mothers in Harlow’s experiment were not responsive, obviously; however, their presence, the material used to cover them, and their shape allowed the rhesus infants to cling to them, providing comfort, albeit a basic, unresponsive one.

The findings from research by Harlow and Bowlby led to pioneering work by Mary Ainsworth on infant–mother attachments and attachment theory in infants. Specifically, she developed an alternative method to study child–parent attachments, using the ‘strange situation procedure’:

• The parent and child are placed together in an unfamiliar room.
• At some point, a (female) stranger enters the room, chats to the parent and plays with/chats to the infant.
• The parent leaves the room, and the child and stranger are alone together.
• The parent returns to the room, and the stranger leaves. The parent chats and plays with the child.
• The parent leaves the room, and the child is alone.
• The stranger returns and tries to chat and play with the child.

Depending on how the child behaved at the separation and introduction of the parent and the stranger, respectively, the attachment style between the infant and mother was classified as either secure, anxious-avoidant, or anxious-resistant.

For more reading on Mary Ainsworth, Harlow, and Bowlby, you can find out more about their work in our What is Attachment Theory? article.

Harlow’s studies on dependency in monkeys – Michael Baker

Subsequent research has questioned some of Harlow’s original findings and theories (Rutter, 1979). Some of these criticisms include:

• Harlow’s emphasis on the importance of a single, maternal figure in the child–parent relationship. As mentioned earlier, children can develop important relationships with different caregivers who do not need to be female/maternal figures (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964).
• The difference between a bond and an attachment. Children can form attachments without forming bonds. For example, a child might follow a teacher (i.e., an example of attachment behavior) and yet not have any deep bonds or relationships with other children. This suggests that these two types of relationships might be slightly different or governed by different processes.
• Other factors can also influence the relationship between child and parent, and their attachment. One such factor is the temperament of the parent or the child (Sroufe, 1985). For example, an anxious parent or child might show behavior that suggests an insecure attachment style.  Another factor is that behaviors that suggest attachment do not necessarily mean that the parent is better responding to the child’s needs. For example, children are more likely to follow a parent when in an unfamiliar environment. This behavior does not automatically imply that the child’s behavior is a result of the way the parent has responded in the past; instead, this is just how children behave.

One of Harlow’s most controversial claims was that peers were an adequate substitute for maternal figures. Specifically, he argued that monkeys that were raised with other similarly aged monkeys behaved the same as monkeys that were raised with their parents. In other words, the relationship with a parent is not unique, and peers can meet these ‘parental’ needs.

However, subsequent research showed that rhesus monkeys raised with peers were shyer, explored less, and occupied lower roles in monkey hierarchies (Suomi, 2008; Bastian, Sponberg, Suomi, & Higley, 2002).

Importantly, Harlow’s experiments are not evidence that there should be no separation between parent and infant. Such a scenario would be almost impossible in a normal environment today. Frequent separations between parent and infant are normal; however, it is critical that the infant can re-establish contact with the parent.

If contact is successfully re-established, then the bond between parent and child is reinforced.

Impact on psychological theories about human behavior

Harlow’s research on rhesus monkeys demonstrated the important role that parents have in our development and that humans have other salient needs that must be met to achieve happiness.

Harlow’s work added weight to the arguments put forward by Sigmund Freud (2003) that our relationship with our parents can affect our psychological development and behavior later in our lives.

Harlow’s work also influenced research on human needs. For example, Maslow (1943) argued that humans have a hierarchy of needs that must be met in order to experience life satisfaction  and happiness.

The first tier comprises physiological needs, such as hunger and thirst, followed by the second tier of needs such as having a secure place to live. The third tier describes feelings of love and belonging, such as having emotional bonds with other people. Maslow argued that self-actualization could only be reached when all of our needs were met.

Harlow continued to perform experiments on rhesus monkeys, including studying the effects of partial to complete social deprivation. It is highly unlikely that Harlow’s experiments would pass the rigorous requirements of any ethics committee today. The separation of an infant from their parent, especially intending to study the effect of this separation, would be considered cruel.

Kobak (2012) outlines the experiments performed by Harlow, and it is immediately obvious that many of these animals experienced severe emotional distress because of their living conditions.

In the partial isolation experiments, Harlow isolated a group of 56 monkeys from other monkeys; although they could hear and see the other monkeys, they were prevented from interacting with or touching them. These monkeys developed aggressive and severely disturbed behavior, such as staring into space, repetitive behaviors, and self-harm through chewing and tearing at their flesh.

Furthermore, the monkeys that were raised in isolation did not display normal mating behavior and failed in mating.

The complete social deprivation experiments were especially cruel. In these experiments, they raised the monkeys in a box, alone, with no sensory contact with other monkeys. They never saw, heard, or came into contact with any other monkeys.

The only contact that they had was with a human experimenter, but this was through a one-way screen and remote control; there was no visual input of another living creature.

Harlow described this experience as the ‘pit of despair.’ Monkeys raised in this condition for two years showed severely disturbed behavior, unable to interact with other monkeys, and efforts to reverse the effect of two years in isolation were unsuccessful.

Harlow considered this experiment as an analogy of what happens to children completely deprived of any social contact for the first few years of their lives.

The effects of Harlow’s experiments were not limited to only one generation of monkeys. In one of his studies, a set of rhesus monkeys raised with surrogates, rather than their own mothers, gave birth to their own infants.

Harlow observed that these parent-monkeys, which he termed ‘motherless monkeys,’ were dysfunctional parents. They either ignored their offspring or were extremely aggressive toward them. They raised two generations of monkeys to test the effect of parental deprivation.

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Harlow’s monkey experiments were cruel, but it would have been impossible to conduct the same experiments using human infants.

Furthermore, Harlow’s experiments helped shift attention to the important role that caregivers provide for children.

When Harlow was publishing his research, the medical fraternity believed that meeting the physical needs of children was enough to ensure a healthy child. In other words, if the child is fed, has water, and is kept warm and clean, then the child will develop into a healthy adult.

Harlow’s experiments showed that this advice was not true and that the emotional needs of infants are critical to healthy development.

With love, affection, and comfort, infants can develop into healthy adults.

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• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation . Erlbaum.
• Bastian, M. L., Sponberg, A. C., Suomi, S. J., & Higley, J. D. (2002). Long-term effects of infant rearing condition on the acquisition of dominance rank in juvenile and adult rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Developmental Psychobiology , 42 , 44–51.
• Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health . Columbia University Press.
• Bowlby, J. (1958). The nature of the child’s tie to his mother. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 39 , 350–373.
• Bowlby, J., & World Health Organization. (1952). Maternal care and mental health: A report prepared on behalf of the World Health Organization as a contribution to the United Nations programme for the welfare of homeless children . World Health Organization.
• Colman, M. A. (2001). Oxford dictionary of psychology . Oxford University Press.
• Freud, S. (2003). An outline of psychoanalysis . Penguin UK.
• Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist , 13 (12), 673.
• Kobak, R. (2012). Attachment and early social deprivation: Revisiting Harlow’s monkey studies. Developmental psychology: Revisiting the classic studies , S , 10–23.
• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review , 50 (4), 370–96.
• Rutter, M. (1979). Maternal deprivation, 1972–1978: New findings, new concepts, new approaches. Child Development , 50 (2), 283–305.
• Schaffer, H. R., & Emerson, P. E. (1964). The development of social attachments in infancy. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 29 (3), 1–77.
• Sroufe, L. A. (1985). Attachment classification from the perspective of infant-caregiver relationships and infant temperament. Child Development , 56 (1), 1–14.
• Suomi, S. J. (2008). Attachment in rhesus monkeys. In J. Cassidy & P. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research and clinical applications (pp. 173–191). Guilford Press.

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Parental attunement and attention also shape the architecture of the brain and the function of the nervous system. When a child does not encounter sufficient parental attunement, compassion, kindness, and empathy, they are deprived of experiences that foster the integration of the brain. This results in a dysregulated nervous system, which cannot produce regulated emotions, thoughts, behaviors, relationships, or bodily systems. The impeded integration causes internal distress, the symptoms of which include chronic illness, recurrent pain, poor relationships, and “mental health” conditions (which are health conditions).

The child (and subsequently insufficiently supported adult) tries to find relief through whatever means are available: numbing, acting out, withdrawing, overeating, substance abuse, dissociation, splitting, self-harm, etc. These are not “disorders” but *survival adaptations* demanded by the unsafe environment. The child/adult uses whatever survival adaptations are available; when they have better options, they use them.

When the dysregulated person receives sufficient psychosocial support, such as through truly therapeutic or other integrative relationships, the brain can integrate and the nervous system can regulate. People, like animals and plants, flourish in supportive environments. Fix the environment and the symptoms fade.

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Harry Harlow Theory & Rhesus Monkey Experiments in Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

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Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Harlow (1958 wanted to study the mechanisms by which newborn rhesus monkeys bond with their mothers.

These infants depended highly on their mothers for nutrition, protection, comfort, and socialization.  What, exactly, though, was the basis of the bond?

The learning theory of attachment suggests that an infant would form an attachment with a carer who provides food. In contrast, Harlow explained that attachment develops due to the mother providing “tactile comfort,” suggesting that infants have an innate (biological) need to touch and cling to something for emotional comfort.

Harry Harlow did a number of studies on attachment in rhesus monkeys during the 1950’s and 1960″s.  His experiments took several forms:

Cloth Mother vs. Wire Mother Experiment

Experiment 1.

Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry toweling cloth.

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.

Both groups of monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother (even if she had no milk).  The infant would only go to the wire mother when hungry. Once fed it would return to the cloth mother for most of the day.  If a frightening object was placed in the cage the infant took refuge with the cloth mother (its safe base).

This surrogate was more effective in decreasing the youngster’s fear.  The infant would explore more when the cloth mother was present.

This supports the evolutionary theory of attachment , in that the sensitive response and security of the caregiver are important (as opposed to the provision of food).

Experiment 2

Harlow (1958) modified his experiment and separated the infants into two groups: the terrycloth mother which provided no food, or the wire mother which did.

All the monkeys drank equal amounts and grew physically at the same rate. But the similarities ended there. Monkeys who had soft, tactile contact with their terry cloth mothers behaved quite differently than monkeys whose mothers were made out of hard wire.

The behavioral differences that Harlow observed between the monkeys who had grown up with surrogate mothers and those with normal mothers were;

• They were much more timid.
• They didn’t know how to act with other monkeys.
• They were easily bullied and wouldn’t stand up for themselves.
• They had difficulty with mating.
• The females were inadequate mothers.

These behaviors were observed only in the monkeys left with the surrogate mothers for more than 90 days.

For those left less than 90 days, the effects could be reversed if placed in a normal environment where they could form attachments.

Rhesus Monkeys Reared in Isolation

Harlow (1965) took babies and isolated them from birth. They had no contact with each other or anybody else.

He kept some this way for three months, some for six, some for nine and some for the first year of their lives. He then put them back with other monkeys to see what effect their failure to form attachment had on behavior.

The results showed the monkeys engaged in bizarre behavior, such as clutching their own bodies and rocking compulsively. They were then placed back in the company of other monkeys.

To start with the babies were scared of the other monkeys, and then became very aggressive towards them. They were also unable to communicate or socialize with other monkeys. The other monkeys bullied them. They indulged in self-mutilation, tearing hair out, scratching, and biting their own arms and legs.<!–

In addition, Harlow created a state of anxiety in female monkeys which had implications once they became parents. Such monkeys became so neurotic that they smashed their infant’s face into the floor and rubbed it back and forth.

Harlow concluded that privation (i.e., never forming an attachment bond) is permanently damaging (to monkeys).

The extent of the abnormal behavior reflected the length of the isolation. Those kept in isolation for three months were the least affected, but those in isolation for a year never recovered from the effects of privation.

Conclusions

Studies of monkeys raised with artificial mothers suggest that mother-infant emotional bonds result primarily from mothers providing infants with comfort and tactile contact, rather than just fulfilling basic needs like food.

Harlow concluded that for a monkey to develop normally s/he must have some interaction with an object to which they can cling during the first months of life (critical period).

Clinging is a natural response – in times of stress the monkey runs to the object to which it normally clings as if the clinging decreases the stress.

He also concluded that early maternal deprivation leads to emotional damage but that its impact could be reversed in monkeys if an attachment was made before the end of the critical period .

However, if maternal deprivation lasted after the end of the critical period, then no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the emotional damage that had already occurred.

Harlow found, therefore, that it was social deprivation rather than maternal deprivation that the young monkeys were suffering from.

When he brought some other infant monkeys up on their own, but with 20 minutes a day in a playroom with three other monkeys, he found they grew up to be quite normal emotionally and socially.

The Impact of Harlow’s Research

Harlow’s research has helped social workers to understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse such as a lack of comfort (and so intervene to prevent it).

Using animals to study attachment can benefit children who are most at risk in society and can also have later economic implications, as those children are more likely to grow up to be productive members of society.

Ethics of Harlow’s Study

Harlow’s work has been criticized.  His experiments have been seen as unnecessarily cruel (unethical) and of limited value in attempting to understand the effects of deprivation on human infants.

It was clear that the monkeys in this study suffered from emotional harm from being reared in isolation.  This was evident when the monkeys were placed with a normal monkey (reared by a mother), they sat huddled in a corner in a state of persistent fear and depression.

Harlow’s experiment is sometimes justified as providing a valuable insight into the development of attachment and social behavior. At the time of the research, there was a dominant belief that attachment was related to physical (i.e., food) rather than emotional care.

It could be argued that the benefits of the research outweigh the costs (the suffering of the animals).  For example, the research influenced the theoretical work of John Bowlby , the most important psychologist in attachment theory.

It could also be seen as vital in convincing people about the importance of emotional care in hospitals, children’s homes, and daycare.

Harlow, H. F., Dodsworth, R. O., & Harlow, M. K. (1965). Total social isolation in monkeys . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 54 (1), 90.

Harlow, H. F. & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affective responsiveness in infant monkeys . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102 ,501 -509.

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Harry Harlow and the Nature of Affection

What Harlow's Infamous Monkey Mother Experiments Revealed

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Adah Chung is a fact checker, writer, researcher, and occupational therapist. 

• Love and Affection
• Harry Harlow's Research on Love
• Wire Mother Experiment
• Fear and Security

Impact of Harry Harlow’s Research

Frequently asked questions.

Harry Harlow was one of the first psychologists to scientifically investigate the nature of human love and affection. Through a series of controversial monkey mother experiments, Harlow was able to demonstrate the importance of early attachments, affection, and emotional bonds in the course of healthy development.

This article discusses his famous monkey mother experiments and what the results revealed. It also explores why Harlow's monkey experiments are so unethical and controversial.

Early Research On Love

During the first half of the 20th century, many psychologists believed that showing affection towards children was merely a sentimental gesture that served no real purpose. According to many thinkers of the day, affection would only spread diseases and lead to adult psychological problems.

"When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument," the behaviorist John B. Watson once even went so far as to warn parents.

Psychologists were motivated to prove their field as a rigorous science. The behaviorist movement dominated the field of psychology during this time. This approach urged researchers to study only observable and measurable behaviors.

An American psychologist named Harry Harlow , however, became interested in studying a topic that was not so easy to quantify and measure—love. In a series of controversial experiments conducted during the 1960s, Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love and in particular, the absence of love.   

His work demonstrated the devastating effects of deprivation on young rhesus monkeys. Harlow's research revealed the importance of a caregiver's love for healthy childhood development.

Harlow's experiments were often unethical and shockingly cruel , yet they uncovered fundamental truths that have influenced our understanding of child development.

Harry Harlow's Research on Love

Harlow noted that very little attention had been devoted to the experimental research of love. At the time, most observations were largely philosophical and anecdotal.

"Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalysts ," he noted.

Many of the existing theories of love centered on the idea that the earliest attachment between a mother and child was merely a means for the child to obtain food, relieve thirst, and avoid pain. Harlow, however, believed that this behavioral view of mother-child attachments was an inadequate explanation.

The Monkey Mother Experiment

His most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different "mothers." One was made of soft terrycloth but provided no food. The other was made of wire but provided nourishment from an attached baby bottle.

Harlow removed young monkeys from their natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be "raised" by these mother surrogates. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with their cloth mother than with their wire mother.

In other words, the infant monkeys went to the wire mother only for food but preferred to spend their time with the soft, comforting cloth mother when they were not eating.

Based on these findings, Harry Harlow concluded that affection was the primary force behind the need for closeness.

Harry Harlow's Further Research

Later research demonstrated that young monkeys would also turn to their cloth surrogate mother for comfort and security. Such work revealed that affectionate bonds were critical for development.

Harlow utilized a "strange situation" technique similar to the one created by attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth . Young monkeys were allowed to explore a room either in the presence of their surrogate mother or in her absence.

Monkeys who were with their cloth mother would use her as a secure base to explore the room. When the surrogate mothers were removed from the room, the effects were dramatic. The young monkeys no longer had their secure base for exploration and would often freeze up, crouch, rock, scream, and cry.

Harry Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital for normal childhood development . Additional experiments by Harlow revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to profound psychological and emotional distress and even death.

Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups, and childcare providers approached the care of children.

Harlow's work led to acclaim and generated a wealth of research on love, affection, and interpersonal relationships. However, his own personal life was marked by conflict.

After the terminal illness of his wife, he became engulfed by alcohol misuse and depression, eventually becoming estranged from his own children. Colleagues frequently described him as sarcastic, mean-spirited, misanthropic, chauvinistic, and cruel.

While he was treated for depression and eventually returned to work, his interests shifted following the death of his wife. He no longer focused on maternal attachment and instead developed an interest in depression and isolation.

Despite the turmoil that marked his later personal life, Harlow's enduring legacy reinforced the importance of emotional support, affection, and love in the development of children.

A Word From Verywell

Harry Harlow's work was controversial in his own time and continues to draw criticism today. While such experiments present major ethical dilemmas, his work helped inspire a shift in the way that we think about children and development and helped researchers better understand both the nature and importance of love.

Harlow's research demonstrated the importance of love and affection, specifically contact comfort, for healthy childhood development. His research demonstrated that children become attached to caregivers that provide warmth and love, and that this love is not simply based on providing nourishment. 

Harlow's monkey mother experiment was unethical because of the treatment of the infant monkeys. The original monkey mother experiments were unnecessarily cruel. The infant monkeys were deprived of maternal care and social contact.

In later experiments, Harlow kept monkeys in total isolation in what he himself dubbed a "pit of despair." While the experiments provided insight into the importance of comfort contact for early childhood development, the research was cruel and unethical.

Hu TY, Li J, Jia H, Xie X. Helping others, warming yourself: altruistic behaviors increase warmth feelings of the ambient environment . Front Psychol . 2016;7:1349. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01349

Suomi SJ. Risk, resilience, and gene-environment interplay in primates . J Can Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry . 2011;20(4):289-297.

Zhang B. Consequences of early adverse rearing experience(EARE) on development: insights from non-human primate studies . Zool Res . 2017;38(1):7-35. doi:10.13918/j.issn.2095-8137.2017.002

Harlow HF. The nature of love .  American Psychologist. 1958;13(12):673-685. doi:10.1037/h0047884

Hong YR, Park JS. Impact of attachment, temperament and parenting on human development . Korean J Pediatr . 2012;55(12):449-454. doi:10.3345/kjp.2012.55.12.449

Blum D. Love at Goon Park . New York: Perseus Publishing; 2011.

Ottaviani J, Meconis D. Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love . Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs; 2007.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Harlow’s Monkey Experiment (Definition + Contribution to Psychology)

Not all experiments in psychology involve humans; nevertheless, those utilizing animals often aim to shed light on human behavior. Harlow's Monkey experiments had a significant impact on psychology, and despite being considered controversial, they remain influential to this day.

What Are Harlow’s Monkey Experiments?

Harlow's Monkey experiments looked at the influence of parental guidance and interaction during early development. Infant monkeys were placed in isolation, away from their mothers. In other experiments, he took infant monkeys away from their mothers but placed them in a cage with “surrogate” mothers.

In both sets of experiments, he found that the monkeys displayed a specific set of behaviors as a response to their unusual upbringing.

Psychology Before Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Harry Harlow, the man behind the monkey experiments, was a psychologist in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, some conflicting ideas were going around about parenting styles.

Early behaviorists didn’t think parents should be so cuddly. Watson told parents that lots of physical affection would slow down their development.

For years, psychology students were taught that B.F. Skinner’s daughter was subject to the behaviorist’s experiments, and she went crazy after being isolated in a glass box for the first year of her life. Skinner said that she was raised just fine in isolation. (Skinner’s daughter refutes some rumors in a Guardian article .)

As time went on, psychoanalysts like Freud theorized that a child’s development was stunted if the mother didn’t provide love and attention in the first year of the child’s life. If a child experienced trauma during this year, they would develop an oral fixation. After all, getting fed was the most important experience in the first year of a child’s life.

There were a lot of different ideas on how to raise a child. And it makes sense that most parents wanted to do the “right” thing.

So psychologists started to build experiments to test some of these theories. Harry Harlow was one of them. But rather than studying children, he studied rhesus monkeys. His experiments were very different from a lot of psychologists at the time. He wanted to focus on the impact of love and basic physiological needs.

What Happened During Harlow's Monkey Experiments?

The monkeys in isolation were separated from other monkeys for 3-12 months. During that time, some would display behaviors to possibly “self-soothe.” Others would self-mutilate. They would circle anxiously and appear to be distressed.

Harlow also studied what happened when these monkeys were placed back in the company of other monkeys. The results were slightly disturbing. They continued to self-mutilate. They couldn’t integrate themselves into society. These isolated monkeys were scared, aggressive, or dumbfounded. Some of the monkeys died after they stopped eating.

Harlow noted that the longer the monkeys stayed in isolation, the harder it was for them to integrate into society.

Monkeys With Wire or Cloth Mothers

So the monkeys were negatively affected by isolation. But Harlow wanted to go further. Why were the monkeys impacted so significantly? Was it solely because of physiological factors, or did love and affection play a role?

To answer these questions, Harlow set up another experiment. He took the infant monkeys away from their mothers and placed them in a cage with two “surrogate” mothers. One of these surrogate mothers was made out of wire. The other was made out of cloth.

In some cages, the wire mother had food for the monkeys. The cloth mother did not. In other cases, the cloth mother had food for the monkeys. The wire mother did not.

Harlow observed that no matter which surrogate mother held the food, the infants would spend more time with the comforting cloth mother. If only the wire mother had food, the monkeys would only go to them when hungry. Otherwise, they would stay in the comfort of the cloth mother.

This doesn’t mean that the monkeys were fully developed socially. When these monkeys were placed back into cages with other monkeys, they didn’t integrate well. They were shy, didn’t stand up for themselves if bullied, and had trouble mating. The monkeys that did become mothers also had trouble raising their monkeys. Harlow believed these behaviors resulted from the events in their infancy.

Attachment Theory and Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Suppose you have ever read anything from relationship experts or counselors. In that case, you might hear this idea: our relationship with our parents influences the partners we pick and the way we go about relationships. Many psychologists have shared variations of this idea. Some of these variations are cringe-worthy, and some are quite helpful.

One variation of this idea is Attachment Theory . This theory describes four different types of attachments that we develop based on our relationship with our parents. We bring this attachment style (secure, anxious, etc.) into adult relationships.

Attachment Theory was the product of studies conducted by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. However, their studies are not the only ones influencing how we view attachment formation. One set of experiments, Harlow’s Monkey experiments, played a role in influencing how we view attachment. Due to the unethical nature of this experiment, it’s not always discussed in a psychology class or discussions about relationships.

Controversy and Other Studies on Attachment

If you think, “Those poor monkeys!” you’re not alone. Many people believed that Harlow’s experiments were unethical. Why would you subject live animals to an experiment that would ultimately traumatize them? Remember, some of these monkeys died early due to starvation caused by anxious behaviors. Did those monkeys need to die for the good of science?

While some say yes, others say no. Not all studies on attachment took such harsh measures. For example, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth observed parents and children as parents left the room for a few minutes at a time. You can learn more about these studies, and the Attachment Styles developed as a result of these studies in another video.

Despite the controversy surrounding his experiments, Harlow did positively impact the world of psychology and parenting. The risks he took for studying love and care, when those topics weren’t discussed in psychology, paid off. His work showed the importance of love and affection. Caregivers, parents, and guardians took note. If your parents or grandparents showed you love and affection as a child, you can thank the research of Harry Harlow and other psychologists who studied Attachment and development.

Related posts:

• Dreams Of Monkeys Meaning (12 Reasons + Interpretation)
• Attachment Styles Theory (Free Test)
• John Bowlby Biography - Contributions To Psychology
• Mary Ainsworth (Biography)
• Golden Child Syndrome (Definition + Examples)

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Harlow’s Monkey Experiment – The Bond between Babies and Mothers

Harry Harlow was an American psychologist whose studies were focused on the effects of maternal separation, dependency, and social isolation on both mental and social development.

Objective of the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment

The idea came to Harlow when he was developing the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus or the WGTA to study the mental processes of primates, which include memory, cognition and learning. As he developed his tests, he realized that the monkeys he worked with were slowly learning how to develop strategies around his tests.

Harlow had the idea that infant monkeys who are separated from their mothers at a very early age (within 90 days) can easily cope with a surrogate, because the bond with the biological mother has not yet been established. Furthermore, he also wanted to learn whether the bond is established because of pure nourishment of needs (milk), or if it involves other factors.

How did the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment work?

Results of the harlow monkey experiment.

Furthermore, the results of the second experiment showed that while the baby monkeys in both groups consumed the same amount of milk from their “mother”, the babies who grew up with the terry cloth mother exhibited emotional attachment and what is considered as normal behaviour when presented with stressful variables. Whenever they felt threatened, they would stay close to the terry cloth mother and cuddle with it until they were calm.

Significance of the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment

Moreover, it was found that the establishment of bond between baby and mother is not purely dependent on the satisfaction of one’s physiological needs (warmth, safety, food) , but also emotional (acceptance, love, affection).

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Classics in the History of Psychology

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University , Toronto , Ontario ISSN 1492-3173

(Return to Classics index )

The Nature of Love

Harry F. Harlow (1958) [ 1 ] University of Wisconsin

First published in American Psychologist , 13 , 673-685

Posted March 2000

Address of the President at the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D. C., August 31, 1958. First published in American Psychologist , 13 , 573-685.

Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists. But of greater concern is the fact that psychologists tend to give progressively less attention to a motive which pervades our entire lives. Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love or affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence.

The apparent repression of love by modem psychologists stands in sharp contrast with the attitude taken by many famous and normal people. The word "love" has the highest reference frequency of any word cited in Bartlett's book of Familiar Quotations. It would appear that this emotion has long had a vast interest and fascination for human beings, regardless of the attitude taken by psychologists; but the quotations cited, even by famous and normal people, have a mundane redundancy. These authors and authorities have stolen love from the child and infant and made it the exclusive property of the adolescent and adult.

Thoughtful men, and probably all women, have speculated on the nature of love. From the developmental point of view, the general plan is quite clear: The initial love responses of the human being are those made by the infant to the mother or some mother surrogate. From this intimate attachment of the child to the mother, multiple learned and generalized affectional responses are formed.

Unfortunately, beyond these simple facts we know little about the fundamental variables underlying the formation of affectional responses and little about the mechanisms through which the love of the infant for the mother develops into the multifaceted response patterns characterizing love or affection in the adult. Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalysts.

The position commonly held by psychologists and sociologists is quite clear: The basic motives are, for the most part, the primary drives -- particularly hunger, thirst, elimination, pain, and sex -- and all other motives, including love or affection, are derived or secondary drives. The mother is associated with the reduction of the primary drives -- particularly hunger, thirst, and pain -- and through learning, affection or love is derived.

It is entirely reasonable to believe that the mother through association with food may become a secondary-reinforcing agent, but this is an inadequate mechanism to account for the persistence of the infant-maternal ties. There is a spate of researches on the formation of secondary reinforcers to hunger and thirst reduction. There can be no question that almost any external stimulus can become a secondary reinforcer if properly associated with tissue-need reduction, but the fact remains that this redundant literature demonstrates unequivocally that such derived drives suffer relatively rapid experimental extinction. Contrariwise, human affection does not extinguish when the mother ceases to have intimate association with the drives in question. Instead, the affectional ties to the mother show a lifelong, unrelenting persistence and, even more surprising, widely expanding generality.

Oddly enough, one of the few psychologists who took a position counter to modern psychological dogma was John B. Watson, who believed that love was an innate emotion elicited by cutaneous stimulation of the erogenous zones. But experimental psychologists, with their peculiar propensity to discover facts that are not true, brushed this theory aside by demonstrating that the human neonate had no differentiable emotions, and they established a fundamental psychological law that prophets are without honor in their own profession.

The psychoanalysts have concerned themselves with the problem of the nature of the development of love in the neonate and infant, using ill and aging human beings as subjects. They have discovered the overwhelming importance of the breast and related this to the oral erotic tendencies developed at an age preceding their subjects' memories. Their theories range from a belief that the infant has an innate need to achieve and suckle at the breast to beliefs not unlike commonly accepted psychological theories. There are exceptions, as seen in the recent writings of John Bowlby, who attributes importance not only to food and thirst satisfaction, but also to "primary object-clinging," a need for intimate physical contact, which is initially associated with the mother.

As far as I know, there exists no direct experimental analysis of the relative importance of the stimulus variables determining the affectional or love responses in the neonatal and infant primate. Unfortunately, the human neonate is a limited experimental subject for such researches because of his inadequate motor capabilities. By the time the human infant's motor responses can be precisely measured, the antecedent determining conditions cannot be defined, having been lost in a jumble and jungle of confounded variables.

Many of these difficulties can be resolved by the use of the neonatal and infant macaque monkey as the subject for the analysis of basic affectional variables. It is possible to make precise measurements in this primate beginning at two to ten days of age, depending upon the maturational status of the individual animal at birth. The macaque infant differs from the human infant in that the monkey is more mature at birth and grows more rapidly; but the basic responses relating to affection, including nursing, contact, clinging, and even visual and auditory exploration, exhibit no fundamental differences in the two species. Even the development of perception, fear, frustration, and learning capability follows very similar sequences in rhesus monkeys and human children.

Three years' experimentation before we started our studies on affection gave us experience with the neonatal monkey. We had separated more than 60 of these animals from their mothers 6 to 12 hours after birth and suckled them on tiny bottles. The infant mortality was only a small fraction of what would have obtained had we let the monkey mothers raise their infants. Our bottle-fed babies were healthier and heavier than monkey-mother-reared infants. We know that we are better monkey mothers than are real monkey mothers thanks to synthetic diets, vitamins, iron extracts, penicillin, chloromycetin, 5% glucose, and constant, tender, loving care.

During the course of these studies we noticed that the laboratory raised babies showed strong attachment to the cloth pads (folded gauze diapers) which were used to cover the hardware-cloth floors of their cages. The infants clung to these pads and engaged in violet temper tantrums when the pads were removed and replaced for sanitary reasons. Such contact-need or responsiveness had been reported previously by Gertrude van Wagenen for the monkey and by Thomas McCulloch and George Haslerud for the chimpanzee and is reminiscent of the devotion often exhibited by human infants to their pillows, blankets, and soft, cuddly stuffed toys. Responsiveness by the one-day-old infant monkey to the cloth pad is shown in Figure 1, and an unusual and strong attachment of a six-month-old infant to the cloth pad is illustrated in Figure 2. The baby, human or monkey, if it is to survive, must clutch at more than a straw.

At this point we decided to study the development of affectional responses of neonatal and infant monkeys to an artificial, inanimate mother, and so we built a surrogate mother which we hoped and believed would be a good surrogate mother. In devising this surrogate mother we were dependent neither upon the capriciousness of evolutionary processes nor upon mutations produced by chance radioactive fallout. Instead, we designed the mother surrogate in terms of modem human engineering principles (Figure 3). We produced a perfectly proportioned, streamlined body stripped of unnecessary bulges and appendices. Redundancy in the surrogate mother's system was avoided by reducing the number of breasts from two to one and placing this unibreast in an upper-thoracic, sagittal position, thus maximizing the natural and known perceptual-motor capabilities of the infant operator. The surrogate was made from a block of wood, covered with sponge rubber, and sheathed in tan cotton terry cloth. A light bulb behind her radiated heat. The result was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger. Furthermore, we designed a mother-machine with maximal maintenance efficiency since failure of any system or function could be resolved by the simple substitution of black boxes and new component parts. It is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by the monkey fathers.

One control group of neonatal monkeys was raised on a single wire mother, and a second control group was raised on a single cloth mother. There were no differences between these two groups in amount of milk ingested or in weight gain. The only difference between the two groups lay in the composition of the feces, the softer stools of the wire-mother infants suggesting psychosomatic involvement. The wire mother is biologically adequate but psychologically inept.

We were not surprised to discover that contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable, but we did not expect it to overshadow so completely the variable of nursing; indeed; indeed, the disparity is so great as to suggest that the primary function of nursing as an affectional variable is that of insuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the mother. Certainly, man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed, and we may be sure that there is nothing to be gained by giving lip service to love.

A charming lady once heard me describe these experiments and, when I subsequently talked to her, her face brightened with sudden insight: "Now I know what's wrong with me," she said, "I'm just a wire mother." Perhaps she was lucky. She might have been a wire wife.

We believe that contact comfort has long served the animal kingdom as a motivating agent for affectional responses. Since at the present time we have no experimental data to substantiate this position, we supply information which must be accepted, if at all, on the basis of face validity:

One function of the real mother, human or subhuman, and presumably of a mother surrogate, is to provide a haven of safety for the infant in times of fear and danger. The frightened or ailing child clings to its mother, not its father; and this selective responsiveness in times of distress, disturbance, or danger may be used as a measure of the strength of affectional bonds. We have tested this kind of differential responsiveness by presenting to the infants in their cages, in the presence of the two mothers, various fear-producing stimuli such as the moving toy bear illustrated in Figure 13. A typical response to a fear stimulus is shown in Figure 14, and the data on differential responsiveness are presented in Figure 15. It is apparent that the cloth mother is highly preferred over the wire one, and this differential selectivity is enhanced by age and experience. In this situation, the variable of nursing appears to be of absolutely no importance: the infant consistently seeks the soft mother surrogate regardless of nursing condition.

Similarly, the mother or mother surrogate provides its young with a source of security, and this role or function is seen with special clarity when mother and child are in a strange situation. At the present time we have completed tests for this relationship on four of our eight baby monkeys assigned to the dual mother-surrogate condition by introducing them for three minutes into the strange environment of a room measuring six feet by six feet by six feet (also called the "open-field test") and containing multiple stimuli known to elicit curiosity-manipulatory responses in baby monkeys. The subjects were placed in this situation twice a week for eight weeks with no mother surrogate present during alternate sessions and the cloth mother present during the others. A cloth diaper was always available as one of the stimuli throughout all sessions. After one or two adaptation sessions, the infants always rushed to the mother surrogate when she was present and clutched her, rubbed their bodies against her, and frequently manipulated her body and face. After a few additional sessions, the infants began to use the mother surrogate as a source of security, a base of operations. As is shown in Figures 16 and 17, they would explore and manipulate a stimulus and then return to the mother before adventuring again into the strange new world. The behavior of these infants was quite different when the mother was absent from the room. Frequently they would freeze in a crouched position, as is illustrated in Figures 18 and 19. Emotionality indices such as vocalization, crouching, rocking, and sucking increased sharply, as shown in Figure 20. Total emotionality score was cut in half when the mother was present. In the absence of the mother some of the experimental monkeys would rush to the center of the room where the mother was customarily placed and then run rapidly from object to object, screaming and crying all the while. Continuous, frantic clutching of their bodies was very common, even when not in the crouching position. These monkeys frequently contacted and clutched the cloth diaper, but this action never pacified them. The same behavior occurred in the presence of the wire mother. No difference between the cloth-mother-fed and wire-mother-fed infants was demonstrated under either condition. Four control infants never raised with a mother surrogate showed the same emotionality scores when the mother was absent as the experimental infants showed in the absence of the mother, but the controls' scores were slightly larger in the presence of the mother surrogate than in her absence.

The first four infant monkeys in the dual mother-surrogate group were separated from their mothers between 165 and 170 days of age and tested for retention during the following 9 days and then at 30-day intervals for six successive months. Affectional retention as measured by the modified Butler box is given in Figure 23. In keeping with the data obtained on adult monkeys by Butler, we find a high rate of responding to any stimulus, even the empty box. But throughout the entire 185-day retention period there is a consistent and significant difference in response frequency to the cloth mother contrasted with either the wire mother or the empty box, and no consistent difference between wire mother and empty box.

Affectional retention was also tested in the open field during the first 9 days after separation and then at 30-day intervals, and each test condition was run twice at each retention interval. The infant's behavior differed from that observed during the period preceding separation. When the cloth mother was present in the post-separation period, the babies rushed to her, climbed up, clung tightly to her, and rubbed their heads and faces against her body. After this initial embrace and reunion, they played on the mother, including biting and tearing at her cloth cover; but they rarely made any attempt to leave her during the test period, nor did they manipulate or play with the objects in the room, in contrast with their behavior before maternal separation. The only exception was the occasional monkey that left the mother surrogate momentarily, grasped the folded piece of paper (one of the standard stimuli in the field), and brought it quickly back to the mother. It appeared that deprivation had enhanced the tie to the mother and rendered the contact-comfort need so prepotent that need for the mother overwhelmed the exploratory motives during the brief, three-minute test sessions. No change in these behaviors was observed throughout the 185-day period. When the mother was absent from the open field, the behavior of the infants was similar in the initial retention test to that during the preseparation tests; but they tended to show gradual adaptation to the open-field situation with repeated testing and, consequently, a reduction in their emotionality scores.

In the last five retention test periods, an additional test was introduced in which the surrogate mother was placed in the center of the room and covered with a clear Plexiglas box. The monkeys were initially disturbed and frustrated when their explorations and manipulations of the box failed to provide contact with the mother. However, all animals adapted to the situation rather rapidly. Soon they used the box as a place of orientation for exploratory and play behavior, made frequent contacts with the objects in the field, and very often brought these objects to the Plexiglas box. The emotionality index was slightly higher than in the condition of the available cloth mothers, but it in no way approached the emotionality level displayed when the cloth mother was absent. Obviously, the infant monkeys gained emotional security by the presence of the mother even though contact was denied.

Affectional retention has also been measured by tests in which the monkey must unfasten a three-device mechanical puzzle to obtain entrance into a compartment containing the mother surrogate. All the trials are initiated by allowing the infant to go through an unlocked door, and in half the trials it finds the mother present and in half, an empty compartment. The door is then locked and a ten-minute test conducted. In tests given prior to separation from the surrogate mothers, some of the infants had solved this puzzle and others had failed. The data of Figure 24 show that on the last test before separation there were no differences in total manipulation under mother-present and mother-absent conditions, but striking differences exist between the two conditions throughout the post-separation test periods. Again, there is no interaction with conditions of feeding.

The over-all picture obtained from surveying the retention data is unequivocal. There is little, if any, waning of responsiveness to the mother throughout this five-month period as indicated by any measure. It becomes perfectly obvious that this affectional bond is highly resistant to forgetting and that it can be retained for very long periods of time by relatively infrequent contact reinforcement. During the next year, retention tests will be conducted at 90-day intervals, and further plans are dependent upon the results obtained. It would appear that affectional responses may show as much resistance to extinction as has been previously demonstrated for learned fears and learned pain, and such data would be in keeping with those of common human observation.

The infant's responses to the mother surrogate in the fear tests, the open-field situation, and the baby Butler box and the responses on the retention tests cannot be described adequately with words. For supplementary information we turn to the motion picture record. (At this point a 20-minute film was presented illustrating and supplementing the behaviors described thus far in the address.)

We have already described the group of four control infants that had never lived in the presence of any mother surrogate and had demonstrated no sign of affection or security in the presence of the cloth mothers introduced in test sessions. When these infants reached the age of 250 days, cubicles containing both a cloth mother and a wire mother were attached to their cages. There was no lactation in these mothers, for the monkeys were on a solid-food diet. The initial reaction of the monkeys to the alterations was one of extreme disturbance. All the infants screamed violently and made repeated attempts to escape the cage whenever the door was opened. They kept a maximum distance from the mother surrogates and exhibited a considerable amount of rocking and crouching behavior, indicative of emotionality. Our first thought was that the critical period for the development of maternally directed affection had passed and that these macaque children were doomed to live as affectional orphans. Fortunately, these behaviors continued for only 12 to 48 hours and then gradually ebbed, changing from indifference to active contact on, and exploration of, the surrogates. The home-cage behavior of these control monkeys slowly became similar to that of the animals raised with the mother surrogates from birth. Their manipulation and play on the cloth mother became progressively more vigorous to the point of actual mutilation, particularly during the morning after the cloth mother had been given her daily change of terry covering. The control subjects were now actively running to the cloth mother when frightened and had to be coaxed from her to be taken from the cage for formal testing.

Objective evidence of these changing behaviors is given in Figure 25, which plots the amount of time these infants spent on the mother surrogates. Within 10 days mean contact time is approximately nine hours, and this measure remains relatively constant throughout the next 30 days. Consistent with the results on the subjects reared from birth with dual mothers, these late-adopted infants spent less than one and one-half hours per day in contact with the wire mothers, and this activity level was relatively constant throughout the test sessions. Although the maximum time that the control monkeys spent on the cloth mother was only about half that Spent by the original dual mother-surrogate group, we cannot be sure that this discrepancy is a function of differential early experience. The control monkeys were about three months older when the mothers were attached to their cages than the experimental animals had been when their mothers were removed and the retention tests begun. Thus, we do not know what the amount of contact would be for a 250-day-old animal raised from birth with surrogate mothers. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the differences and the fact that the contact-time curves for the mothered-from-birth infants had remained constant for almost 150 days suggest that early experience with the mother is a variable of measurable importance.

The control group has also been tested for differential visual exploration after the introduction of the cloth and wire mothers; these behaviors are plotted in Figure 26. By the second test session a high level of exploratory behavior had developed, and the responsiveness to the wire mother and the empty box is significantly greater than that to the cloth mother. This is probably not an artifact since there is every reason to believe that the face of the cloth mother is a fear stimulus to most monkeys that have not had extensive experience with this object during the first 40 to 60 days of life. Within the third test session a sharp change in trend occurs, and the cloth mother is then more frequently viewed than the wire mother or the blank box; this trend continues during the fourth session, producing a significant preference for the cloth mother.

Before the introduction of the mother surrogate into the home-cage situation, only one of the four control monkeys had ever contacted the cloth mother in the open-field tests. In general, the surrogate mother not only gave the infants no security, but instead appeared to serve as a fear stimulus. The emotionality scores of these control subjects were slightly higher during the mother-present test sessions than during the mother-absent test sessions. These behaviors were changed radically by the fourth post-introduction test approximately 60 days later. In the absence of the cloth mothers the emotionality index in this fourth test remains near the earlier level, but the score is reduced by half when the mother is present, a result strikingly similar to that found for infants raised with the dual mother-surrogates from birth. The control infants now show increasing object exploration and play behavior, and they begin to use the mother as a base of operations, as did the infants raised from birth with the mother surrogates. However, there are still definite differences in the behavior of the two groups. The control infants do not rush directly to the mother and clutch her violently; but instead they go toward, and orient around, her, usually after an initial period during which they frequently show disturbed behavior, exploratory behavior, or both.

That the control monkeys develop affection or love for the cloth mother when she is introduced into the cage at 250 days of age cannot be questioned. There is every reason to believe, however, that this interval of delay depresses the intensity of the affectional response below that of the infant monkeys that were surrogate-mothered from birth onward. In interpreting these data it is well to remember that the control monkeys had had continuous opportunity to observe and hear other monkeys housed in adjacent cages and that they had had limited opportunity to view and contact surrogate mothers in the test situations, even though they did not exploit the opportunities.

During the last two years we have observed the behavior of two infants raised by their own mothers. Love for the real mother and love for the surrogate mother appear to be very similar. The baby macaque spends many hours a day clinging to its real mother. If away from the mother when frightened, it rushes to her and in her presence shows comfort and composure. As far as we can observe, the infant monkey's affection for the real mother is strong, but no stronger than that of the experimental monkey for the surrogate cloth mother, and the security that the infant gains from the presence of the real mother is no greater than the security it gains from a cloth surrogate. Next year we hope to put this problem to final, definitive, experimental test. But, whether the mother is real or a cloth surrogate, there does develop a deep and abiding bond between mother and child. In one case it may be the call of the wild and in the other the McCall of civilization, but in both cases there is "togetherness."

In spite of the importance of contact comfort, there is reason to believe that other variables of measurable importance will be discovered. Postural support may be such a variable, and it has been suggested that, when we build arms into the mother surrogate, 10 is the minimal number required to provide adequate child care. Rocking motion may be such a variable, and we are comparing rocking and stationary mother surrogates and inclined planes. The differential responsiveness to cloth mother and cloth-covered inclined plane suggests that clinging as well as contact is an affectional variable of importance. Sounds, particularly natural, maternal sounds, may operate as either unlearned or learned affectional variables. Visual responsiveness may be such a variable, and it is possible that some semblance of visual imprinting may develop in the neonatal monkey. There are indications that this becomes a variable of importance during the course of infancy through some maturational process.

John Bowlby has suggested that there is an affectional variable which he calls "primary object following," characterized by visual and oral search of the mother's face. Our surrogate-mother-raised baby monkeys are at first inattentive to her face, as are human neonates to human mother faces. But by 30 days of age ever-increasing responsiveness to the mother's face appears -- whether through learning, maturation, or both -- and we have reason to believe that the face becomes an object of special attention.

Our first surrogate-mother-raised baby had a mother whose head was just a ball of wood since the baby was a month early and we had not had time to design a more esthetic head and face. This baby had contact with the blank-faced mother for 180 days and was then placed with two cloth mothers, one motionless and one rocking, both being endowed with painted, ornamented faces. To our surprise the animal would compulsively rotate both faces 180 degrees so that it viewed only a round, smooth face and never the painted, ornamented face. Furthermore, it would do this as long as the patience of the experimenter in reorienting the faces persisted. The monkey showed no sign of fear or anxiety, but it showed unlimited persistence. Subsequently it improved its technique, compulsively removing the heads and rolling them into its cage as fast as they were returned. We are intrigued by this observation, and we plan to examine systematically the role of the mother face in the development of infant-monkey affections. Indeed, these observations suggest the need for a series of ethological-type researches on the two-faced female.

Although we have made no attempts thus far to study the generalization of infant-macaque affection or love, the techniques which we have developed offer promise in this uncharted field. Beyond this, there are few if any technical difficulties in studying the affection of the actual, living mother for the child, and the techniques developed can be utilized and expanded for the analysis and developmental study of father-infant and infant-infant affection.

Since we can measure neonatal and infant affectional responses to mother surrogates, and since we know they are strong and persisting, we are in a position to assess the effects of feeding and contactual schedules; consistency and inconsistency in the mother surrogates; and early, intermediate, and late maternal deprivation. Again, we have here a family of problems of fundamental interest and theoretical importance.

If the researches completed and proposed make a contribution, I shall be grateful; but I have also given full thought to possible practical applications. The socioeconomic demands of the present and the threatened socioeconomic demands of the future have led the American woman to displace, or threaten to displace, the American man in science and industry. If this process continues, the problem of proper child-rearing practices faces us with startling clarity. It is cheering in view of this trend to realize that the American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity: the rearing of infants. We now know that women in the working classes are not needed in the home because of their primary mammalian capabilities; and it is possible that in the foreseeable future neonatal nursing will not be regarded as a necessity, but as a luxury ---to use Veblen's term -- a form of conspicuous consumption limited perhaps to the upper classes. But whatever course history may take, it is comforting to know that we are now in contact with the nature of love.

[1] The researches reported in this paper were supported by funds supplied by Grant No. M-722, National Institutes of Health, by a grant from the Ford Foundation, and by funds received from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin.

Harry Harlow with the mother surrogates he used to raise infant monkeys. The terry cloth mother is pictured above. The bare wire mother appears below. Given a choice, infant monkeys invariably preferred surrogate mothers covered with soft terry cloth, and they spent a great deal of time cuddling with them (above), just as they would have with their real mothers (below).   The famous experiments that psychologist Harry Harlow conducted in the 1950s on maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys were landmarks not only in primatology, but in the evolving science of attachment and loss. Harlow himself repeatedly compared his experimental subjects to children and press reports universally treated his findings as major statements about love and development in human beings. These monkey love experiments had powerful implications for any and all separations of mothers and infants, including adoption, as well as childrearing in general. In his University of Wisconsin laboratory, Harlow probed the nature of love, aiming to illuminate its first causes and mechanisms in the relationships formed between infants and mothers. First, he showed that mother love was emotional rather than physiological, substantiating the adoption-friendly theory that continuity of care—“nurture”—was a far more determining factor in healthy psychological development than “nature.” Second, he showed that capacity for attachment was closely associated with critical periods in early life, after which it was difficult or impossible to compensate for the loss of initial emotional security. The critical period thesis confirmed the wisdom of placing infants with adoptive parents as shortly after birth as possible. Harlow’s work provided experimental evidence for prioritizing psychological over biological parenthood while underlining the developmental risks of adopting children beyond infancy. It normalized and pathologized adoption at the same time. How did Harlow go about constructing his science of love? He separated infant monkeys from their mothers a few hours after birth, then arranged for the young animals to be “raised” by two kinds of surrogate monkey mother machines, both equipped to dispense milk. One mother was made out of bare wire mesh. The other was a wire mother covered with soft terry cloth. Harlow’s first observation was that monkeys who had a choice of mothers spent far more time clinging to the terry cloth surrogates, even when their physical nourishment came from bottles mounted on the bare wire mothers. This suggested that infant love was no simple response to the satisfaction of physiological needs. Attachment was not primarily about hunger or thirst. It could not be reduced to nursing. Then Harlow modified his experiment and made a second important observation. When he separated the infants into two groups and gave them no choice between the two types of mothers, all the monkeys drank equal amounts and grew physically at the same rate. But the similarities ended there. Monkeys who had soft, tactile contact with their terry cloth mothers behaved quite differently than monkeys whose mothers were made out of cold, hard wire. Harlow hypothesized that members of the first group benefitted from a psychological resource—emotional attachment—unavailable to members of the second. By providing reassurance and security to infants, cuddling kept normal development on track. What exactly did Harlow see that convinced him emotional attachment made a decisive developmental difference? When the experimental subjects were frightened by strange, loud objects, such as teddy bears beating drums, monkeys raised by terry cloth surrogates made bodily contact with their mothers, rubbed against them, and eventually calmed down. Harlow theorized that they used their mothers as a “psychological base of operations,” allowing them to remain playful and inquisitive after the initial fright had subsided. In contrast, monkeys raised by wire mesh surrogates did not retreat to their mothers when scared. Instead, they threw themselves on the floor, clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, and screamed in terror. These activities closely resembled the behaviors of autistic and deprived children frequently observed in institutions as well as the pathological behavior of adults confined to mental institutions, Harlow noted. The awesome power of attachment and loss over mental health and illness could hardly have been performed more dramatically. In subsequent experiments, Harlow’s monkeys proved that “better late than never” was not a slogan applicable to attachment. When Harlow placed his subjects in total isolation for the first eights months of life, denying them contact with other infants or with either type of surrogate mother, they were permanently damaged. Harlow and his colleagues repeated these experiments, subjecting infant monkeys to varied periods of motherlessness. They concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it had lasted less than 90 days, and estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred. emotional bonds were first established was the key to they could be established at all. For experimentalists like Harlow, only developmental theories verified under controlled laboratory conditions deserved to be called scientific. Harlow was no . He criticized psychoanalysis for speculating on the basis of faulty memories, assuming that adult disorders necessarily originated in childhood experiences, and interpreting too literally the significance of breast-feeding. Yet Harlow’s data confirmed the well known psychoanalytic emphasis on the mother-child relationship at the dawn of life, and his research reflected the repudiation of and the triumph of therapeutic approaches already well underway throughout the human sciences and clinical professions by midcentury. Along with child analysts and researchers, including and René Spitz, Harry Harlow’s experiments added scientific legitimacy to two powerful arguments: against institutional child care and in favor of psychological parenthood. Both suggested that the permanence associated with adoption was far superior to other arrangements when it came to safeguarding the future mental and emotional well-being of children in need of parents. of this page by Boris Kozlow] | | | | | | | Site designed by:   Department of History, University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon 97403-1288 (541) 346-3699 E-mail: © Ellen Herman June 1, 2015 Cruel Experiments on Infant Monkeys Still Happen All the Time--That Needs to Stop Experiments that separate infant monkeys from their mothers cause profound and unnecessary suffering. They should be stopped Raised in total or partial social isolation, clinging desperately to wire or cloth “mothers,” rhesus monkey infants subjected to American psychologist Harry F. Harlow's maternal-deprivation experiments in the 1950s self-mutilated, rocked, and showed other signs of deep depression and anxiety. Based on the principle that animal models could illuminate issues of maternal care and depression in humans, Harlow's research is still discussed in psychology, anthropology and animal behavior classes. Yet this kind of profound primate suffering is not consigned to the historical record. Today rhesus monkey infants are still forcibly separated by laboratory researchers from their mothers and stressed in ways that leave them physically and emotionally traumatized. At the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Laboratory of Comparative Ethology (LCE) in Poolesville, Md., headed by psychologist Stephen Suomi, infant monkeys are taken from their mothers often within hours of birth. For 22 hours a day (24 on weekends), these infants have no cage mates with which to interact. As I know from my work with free-ranging infant wild baboons in Kenya—monkeys that have a social organization similar to that of the rhesus—this regimen results in a terrible distortion of the animals' natural way of life. In the wild, these monkey infants live at the secure center of a matriline, a group of related females. They play with peers and explore their world but scamper back to the warmth and protection of the most important being in their lives, the mother. At the LCE, in contrast, the motherless infants undergo stressors (such as being intentionally frightened while they are alone) in experiments designed to evaluate their reactivity and thus to understand developmental risk factors leading to mental illness in humans. Peer-reviewed literature from the LCE reports that these infants suffer behavioral and biological consequences for the duration of their lives, including poor health, increased stress, maternal incompetence and abnormal aggression. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. As a person who watches two beloved family members struggle with mental illness, I know the importance of research in this arena. Yet systematic reviews tell us conclusively that animal models do not translate well to human mental health. To treat mental illness in humans requires direct attention to the real stressors we experience in our own lives—not artificial ones that we make rhesus infants endure. Research of diverse types, including neuroimaging and long-term follow-up of patients' day-to-day lives, is making substantive inroads in this endeavor. It is no adequate defense to note that this kind of research meets federal and university animal care guidelines. The bar to gain approval to experiment invasively on primates (and other animals) is quite low. As Lawrence Arthur Hansen pointed out two years ago in the Journal of Medical Ethics , oversight committees are disproportionately composed of the very people who derive their livelihood from continuing these experiments: animal researchers and institutional veterinarians. Bringing onboard knowledgeable parties who do not directly benefit from money awarded to these projects—social scientists and bioethicists, for instance—would be a first step in addressing this skew. As Hansen observes, though, equally necessary is a change in institutional culture to ensure that committees more directly consider benefit-harm issues. I am struck by parallels with the case of biomedical research on chimpanzees at the National Institutes of Health, which in 2011 was deemed “unnecessary” by an independent Institute of Medicine review. Repeatedly, biomedical studies on chimpanzees had been approved by review boards and animal care committees. The oversight process did not ethically protect those lab chimpanzees in the past, and it is not ethically protecting the lab monkeys now. It is not necessary to be against all biomedical research on nonhuman primates to see how outdated and misguided some research is. It is time to end Harlow's cruel legacy. Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player Movie Interviews LISTEN & FOLLOW Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Amazon Music Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed. 'Project Nim': A Chimp's Very Human, Very Sad Life In the early 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim was plucked from his mother's arms and transported into human homes in the hopes that he would learn sign language and open a window into ape thoughts. Harry Benson/Roadside Attractions hide caption In the early 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim was plucked from his mother's arms and transported into human homes in the hopes that he would learn sign language and open a window into ape thoughts. Project Nim Director: James Marsh Genre: Documentary Running Time: 93 minutes Rated PG-13 for some strong language, drug content, thematic elements and disturbing images With: Nim Chimpsky, Herbert Terrace, Stephanie LaFarge, Laura-Ann Petitto, Joyce Butler Watch Clips Credit: Roadside Attractions 'Chimps Aren't Humans' In 1973, an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother's arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment. The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp — he bit the children in the house and didn't understand how to behave like a human child. It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years. In 1977, Nim attacked one of the people taking care of him, and the experiment ended. At that point, researchers said he knew more than 125 ASL signs — but no one knew quite what to do with Nim. He was sent to a medical research facility, where he lived in a cage with other chimps for the first time in his life, before being rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. He died in 2000. Nim and the many people who raised him over the years are the subjects of James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim . Marsh and two of the people who worked with Nim join Fresh Air 's Terry Gross for a discussion about the film and about the controversial experiment. "The premise of the experiment was to treat him as much like a human child as possible and to give him the nurturing of a human child in order [to see if] he would behave like one," Marsh says. "And it was quite striking that there wasn't an investigation into what chimpanzees actually were or what they're like. And the wild animal comes out in him very quickly, and [no one] was prepared for that." Jenny Lee: 'He Was Just Included In The Family' The first family to take Nim in lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a giant brownstone. Jenny Lee, who was 13 years old at the time, remembers her mom, Stephanie LaFarge, raising Nim alongside her and her siblings. She says her mother grew quite attached to the chimp, even breastfeeding him throughout his stay at their house. "He needed diapers, he needed bottles, he needed feedings," Lee recalls. "And it was odd he was a chimp. But at the same time, there was kind of a normalcy about it in that he was just included in the family right away." While Jenny and her siblings went to school, Nim learned sign language with researchers at Columbia University. The goal was to open up a window into Nim's thoughts and to see if he could develop real language skills. When he came home each night, Nim would play with the Lee children and mimic their behavior. But as he aged, he became more aggressive — and no one knew what to do. "It was really the biting that became the big problem after maybe he was a year old, because it's painful and it can draw blood," Lee says, "and with human babies, you can teach them not to do that. And that was not something that Nim was able to learn to really control." Nim left the family's house and moved in with a series of caretakers before going to a primate facility on the grounds of the University of Oklahoma. Bob Ingersoll (left) spent nine years with Nim, the subject of an experiment to see if apes could communicate with humans using sign language. Ingersoll is now the president of Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary . Roadside Attractions hide caption Bob Ingersoll (left) spent nine years with Nim, the subject of an experiment to see if apes could communicate with humans using sign language. Ingersoll is now the president of Mindy's Memory Primate Sanctuary . Bob Ingersoll: 'Keeping Chimpanzees In Cages Is Torture' Bob Ingersoll, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, was working as a research assistant at the primate facility and met Nim on his first day. "You could read [fear and apprehension] through his facial expression and his body language," Ingersoll says. "It was very distressing to him and ... we were really worried about Nim and we spent quite a lot of time with him, making sure he was eating and drinking and not being picked on by the other chimps." Ingersoll immediately began using sign language with Nim to comfort him. He says the chimp was never aggressive around him — and quickly became one of his good friends. "It was easy to hang out with him," he says. "He did for me the same thing that I think that I did for him, which was make him feel comfortable and certain and familiar with the situation." More On Project Nim Movie Reviews 'project nim': a chimp learns, and humans don't. 'Project Nim': Monkeying Around With A Chimp The Chimp That Learned Sign Language 'project nim' traces chimp's human life, the human edge, signing, singing, speaking: how language evolved. While taking long walks around the grounds of the primate facility, Ingersoll occasionally smoked pot with Nim, who had been introduced to marijuana in New York City and even appeared in the magazine High Times in 1975. "He actually signed 'stone smoke time now' to us first," Ingersoll says. "We were shocked. Although we were familiar with chimpanzees that did things like drinking and smoke cigarettes and that sort of thing, I'd never had a chimpanzee request weed from me. That was an eye-opener." Ingersoll and Nim spent much of their time together, until Nim was once again moved, this time to a medical research laboratory. Ingersoll later helped rescue Nim from the research facility, and the chimp was moved to a ranch for abused animals. "What he needed at that point was to be with other chimps," Ingersoll says. "Chimps don't need to be with humans. They need to have a chimp life. So my own personal need to hang out with Nim or walk with Nim wasn't as important to me as doing the right thing for Nim. ... Chimpanzees in captivity is just not where they ought to be. ... I would hope that one of the lessons that we learned from Nim's life is that keeping chimpanzees in cages is torture and really plays havoc on their mental health." svg]:stroke-accent-900"> What scientists learned when they tried to raise a chimp with a human baby By Popular Science Team Posted on Sep 21, 2021 7:00 AM EDT 4 minute read What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci ’s hit podcast . The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple , Anchor , and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show. FACT: Trading blood could actually make you “young” again By Corinne Iozzio Scientists have long thought that blood has the power to reshape us—to make an old person feel young, an ill person well again, and an agitated person find calm. Some of the earliest experiments to test this notion, though, did not have stellar results. When Robert Lower developed a crude transfusion technique that he tested on dogs, the donating puppers didn’t survive. But he and other physicians in the mid-1600s felt they were onto something; more specifically, they wanted to know if “calm” blood could help quiet mental illness. To avoid a dead donor they instead transfused their patients with lamb’s blood. In 1667, a pair of public experiments—one in London and one in Paris—were relatively successful, according to the scientists’ own accounts, at least. But the first Parisian infusion, scientific historian  Holly Tucker recounts in her book  Blood Work , raised some, uh, red flags; the subject had what we now know was a normal immune response to such an incursion. The patient’s eventual death, though suspicious, spurred the government and eventually the pope to put the kibosh on the whole bloody business. Here’s the thing, though: As Kat McGowan reports in the new issue of  PopSci , these experiments were, in fact, onto something. Over the last couple decades, a  growing body of research  has found that a sustained commingling of blood supplies—so-called parabiosis—can reverse the signs of aging in lab mice. What remains is to figure out precisely what in the blood is spurring those changes and put that into a manageable form like a shot or a pill—no blood trading, necessary. FACT: Candyland wouldn’t exist without polio By Rachel Feltman Polio is one of those diseases that most of us are lucky enough to not have to worry about. Jonas Salk created an extremely effective vaccine for it that was released in 1955, and cases dropped by 85 to 90 percent within just two years of that initial rollout . We haven’t had a case of polio with US origins since 1979, and the last time the virus was brought into the country to spread here was 1993. That’s not because polio has disappeared; it’s because our vaccination rates are so high. Because of that, it’s easy for us to forget that in the 1950s, polio was a devastating and terrifying disease in the US. In around 1 percent of infections, polio attacks the central nervous system and can lead to permanent paralysis of different parts of the body. Young children are at especially high risk of contracting the virus.  The height of the US polio epidemic was in the 1950s, just before Salk’s vaccine came out, and there was no cure and no understanding of how to prevent it. Something like 15,000 people were being paralyzed each year in the US alone. With no sense of what would actually help their kids avoid polio, a lot of parents spent the early 50s making kids stay indoors all summer, when transmission rates would peak. It was a really scary time—and a boring one. Enter Eleanor Abbott, a school teacher from San Diego. We don’t know much about her, but we know she contracted polio herself in 1948. And sometime during or after her recovery, she designed Candyland . It’s colorful, it’s simple, and the game mechanic is literally about taking a stroll—which is pretty poignant when you realize she designed it primarily for bedridden kids recovering from illness. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about Abbott’s story—and other surprising origins of beloved American board games. FACT: You can’t raise a baby chimpanzee like a tiny human By Purbita Saha Brave psychology couple Winthrop and Luella Kellogg gave this experiment a go in the 1930s—and though it led to some fascinating results, it didn’t pan out too well overall. Winthrop, who ran an animal-stimuli lab at Indiana State University and then Florida State University, was intrigued by the case of two “wolf children” in India whose feral instincts stuck with them for life. He wanted to dig into the question: How much can an infant’s environment change its behavior and development? Winthrop couldn’t quite test his hypothesis on a young human, so he and his wife took in a 7-month-old captive chimpanzee from Cuba to raise alongside their 10-month-old son, Donald. Gua, as the ape was called, received the same care and attention as her “sibling” and was tested daily for a long list of metrics. While she never learned to speak or babble like a person , her physical growth and motor skills progressed quickly—on par with other chimps in captivity. Donald, on the other hand, began imitating Gua’s barks and onomatopoeia, which may have been one reason the experiment ended in just six months. The Kellogg’s documented their whole endeavor in their book, The Ape and the Child . There’s also a silent documentary that’s mostly available online. If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts . You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop . Latest in The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Giraffes are a lot gayer than most people give them credit for giraffes are a lot gayer than most people give them credit for, these orangutans indulge in a spa-like skincare routine these orangutans indulge in a spa-like skincare routine. The 1931 experiment that paired a newborn chimp with a newborn baby One of the earliest experiments in primate-human similarities took place all the way back in the 1930s, when a baby chimp and a baby human were raised in the same house. Shockingly, it didn't turn out well. Suggested Reading Project Nim , a recent documentary, popularized the story of a scientist who raised a newborn baby and a newborn chimpanzee together in the 1970s, looking for similarities, but this was not the first time such an experiment was attempted. In 1931, Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife had a son, Donald, and a "daughter" Gua. Donald was 10 months old at the start of the experiment; Gua was a seven-month-old chimpanzee, acquired from a local primate center. They were raised in the same house, in the same way. Both were fed, diapered, and casually taught in the way all parents try to teach their kids basic language and motor skills. Doctor Kellogg, a psychiatrist, studied how both babies developed, and periodically gave them tasks to complete. Related Content The overall study, called The Ape and the Child , is of more historical than scientific interest. Gua developed, physically, a great deal faster than Donald did. Gua imitated adult behaviors, wearing shoes, opening doors using the door handle, and feeding herself with a glass and a spoon. The chimp also outperformed the human when it came to physical tests. Kellogg would, for example, shut each child in a room with a cookie suspended on a string and time how long they took to grab the cookie down. What really worried the Kelloggs was that Donald didn't seem all that interested in outperforming Gua in verbal trials. Although the infant did better, he lagged behind other babies when it came to speech. (Fortunately, he took to toilet training well even when Gua did not.) Eventually, he started imitating the instinctive hunger barks that Gua made. The parents were no longer interested in using their baby as a control. The experiment was stopped after nine months, and Gua was returned to the primate center where the Kelloggs had acquired her. [Via FSU , Edublox , Museum of Hoaxes ] In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation. TN Navbharat Times Drive ET Now Swadesh In 1931, a baby and a chimp were raised together as part of a bizarre experiment - the end was tragic for both Updated Nov 21, 2022, 15:51 IST Baby Donald with Gua. Breathalyser Equipments Used To Check Drunk Driving To Have This New Update Instagram Introduces AI Studio For Creator Chatbots In Early Test, Reveals Mark Zuckerberg Shloka Mehta's Intergalactic Themed Mini Dress Is A Homage To Earth With Amethyst, Topaz And MORE Embroidered Gems 'Delhi Govt Runs Away During Crisis': Congress Hits Out At INDIA Bloc Ally AAP Amid Severe Waterlogging Rolled-Up Trousers, Shoes in Hand: MPs Brave Flooded Lutyens To Reach Parliament In Delhi Rain New COVID Guidelines: CDC Advises Everyone Over 6 Months To Get Updated COVID-19 Vaccination Tornado In Osage City? Twister Crosses Reading, Kansas' Lyon County On Alert 'He Is A Great Player': Aiden Markram Acknowledges Out Of Form Virat Kohli Ahead Of Summit Showdown Challenge Your Eyesight: Find the Ladder in the Library In 10 Seconds ISRO Scientists' Starting Salary Leaves Internet In Splits: 'White Lie...' | Watch Mumbai Cops Jump Into Sea Amid High Tides to Save Drowning Woman; Internet Salutes | Video 'The Indian Version of Moonwalking’: Viral Video of Man's Dance Moves Amuses Internet Social Media Mocks Delhi Airport Roof Leak, Likens It to Singapore's Rain Vortex Booking.com Virgin Media Breaking News University Guide Meghan Markle Prince Harry King Charles III Extraordinary tale of scientist parents who adopted a chimpanzee to raise as their baby's SISTER - but bitterly regretted bizarre 'nature versus nurture' experiment on their son after it yielded chilling results Winthrop and Luella Kellogg conducted the experiment in 1931 They adopted a chimpanzee called Gua who they raised as their baby Donald's sister, teaching her to eat, sleep and walk like a human  The experiment was due to run for five years but was abandoned after the couple began to notice eerie changes in their son's behavior By Bethan Sexton For Dailymail.Com Published: 16:42 BST, 20 January 2024 | Updated: 16:45 BST, 20 January 2024 View comments Extraordinary video footage shows how two scientist parents attempted to raise their infant son alongside a chimpanzee as part of a bizarre nature versus nurture experiment in 1931.  Psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg conducted the study on their ten-month-old son Donald and a seven-month-old chimp called Gua at their Florida home.   The couple were attempting to establish if it was possible to educate an ape and teach them to communicate as a human.  But the experiment, which they intended to run for five years, was abandoned after just nine months when the pair noticed chilling changes in the behavior of their son.  In 1931 a scientist couple set out to try and raise their son alongside a chimpanzee to test the limits of nature versus nurture The couple conducted the experiment on their ten-month-old son Donald and a seven-month-old chimpanzee named Gua  The study aimed to examine how far a chimp could be socialized but often included cruel experiments including this one pictured - which saw Donald teased until the point of distress Winthrop devised the experiment after becoming fascinated by the 'wolf children' of India - a group of kids who adopted the behavior of the wild animals after being raised away from civilization. After determining that raising a child in the wild would be unethical and dangerous, the couple instead decided to bring an ape into their home and bring it up like their infant son.    Baby Donald and Gua were both woken up at the same time and fed together.  The chimp was dressed like a baby, sporting rompers or a diaper and even little shoes.  She enjoyed her meals in a high chair, was wheeled around in a stroller and slept in a bed. And at the end of the day, she - like Donald - was given a kiss goodnight.  The couple then set about attempting to teach Gua the same skills as a toddler. She learned how to eat using a spoon, drink from a glass and open doors - long before even Donald had acquired the same abilities. The baby and chimp soon became incredibly close, developing a sibling-like bond from being around each other all day. But Donald and Gua were also subjected to a barrage of unusual and often cruel experiments aimed at comparing their reflexes and reactions to scenarios - with their parents recording their findings in detailed notes and on film.  One particularly disturbing experiment saw the couple fire a gun inches from the subjects to test which would react first to the sound Video taken from one experiment showed a gun being fired just inches away from their heads as the scientists sought to find out which would react first to a loud noise. As the weapon was released, the youngsters both flinched before Gua dramatically scrambled into the arms of one of the scientists for safety. Another disturbing experiment saw both spun around at speed. The test only ended when Donald burst into tears. A similarly cruel test involved teasing Donald to the point of distress.  Accounts from the couple also described how they hit the two on the head with spoons, supposedly to try and hear the difference in their skulls.  Other tests appear more benign, including offering both Gua and Donald a spoon whilst sat in a high chair to check which hand is dominant.  It was not long before Gua began to exhibit human behaviors including eating with a spoon and walking on her two legs However, Donald also began adopting ape-like behavior including dragging his knuckles, barking and biting people out of aggression One test saw the couple set up obstacles to check how long it would take for the 'siblings' to get round them. Footage shows Luella Kellogg beckoning to her young son before hiding behind a screen and waiting for him to work out how to get around it.  The couple were obsessed with teaching Gua to speak, with Luella often attempting to move her lips to form words.  Across the experiment the two were also monitored for 'blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span, and others,' according to a psychologists note. At first, Gua's rate of development was much faster than Donald's, especially when it came to motor skills. She learned to respond to 95 phrases, including 'show me your nose' and 'kiss Donald'. But eventually she began to plateau and was outpaced by Donald, most notably when it came to speech. Despite the couple's best efforts, Gua was never able to utter a single word and only communicated in grunts.  And before long before the couple realized that in socializing Gua to become human, their son had adopted some animal traits.  Part of the study involved the couple unsuccessfully trying to teach the chimpanzee to speak The study was eventually abandoned after just nine months when the scientists became concerned about their son's behavior  Donald took to walking around on all fours, dragging his knuckles like an ape.  He would often start biting people when he became aggressive and he and Gua shared a secret language of bark-like noises that they would use to communicate.  Donald began to lag behind his peers in terms of development, and often chose to shun other children in favor of playing with Gua.  All the while, Gua was growing in strength and becoming more and more unpredictable. Eventually, the couple became so concerned by Donald's behavior and the potential for Gua to lash out that they opted to end the experiment early.  They also reportedly lost interest in the experiment after failing to teach Gua to speak.  Gua was returned to captivity and became the subject of another experiment. She spent the rest of her life in a laboratory cage. 'In a very short time span, Gua’s life had gone from being a child reared in a human home, complete with a two-parent family, a sibling, a house, clothing, and a bed, to being a caged laboratory primate,' writes By Andrew R. Halloran in his 2021 book  The Song of the Ape:  Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees.  Donald ultimately took his own life in 1973 aged 43. Gua was returned to a laboratory and spent her final years in a cage before contracting pneumonia which killed her Two years later, Gua contracted pneumonia and died. The results from the Kelloggs' study was published in 1933, entitled  The Ape and the Child. The study concluded that 'there are definite limits to the degree of humanization that can be achieved by non-human species regardless of the amount of socializing and humanizing effects'. Little is known about the impact of the experiment on Donald, but he tragically took his own life in January 1973 at the age of 43. His suicide came after the death of both parents in the summer of 1972. Share or comment on this article: Extraordinary tale of scientist parents who adopted a chimpanzee to raise as their baby's SISTER - but bitterly regretted bizarre 'nature versus nurture' experiment on their son after it yielded chilling results Comments 1084 Share what you think Worst rated The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. 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See this new baby monkey at Zoo Boise, born for genetic diversity Visitors at Zoo Boise may spot a new addition to its animal family — a miniature white-maned monkey, clinging to the back of a parent or one of its older siblings. The zoo welcomed a cotton-top tamarin baby in April as part of its participation in the Species Survival Plan, which aims to ensure the survival of species through managed breeding, said Harry Peachey, the general curator for Zoo Boise. Cotton-top tamarins, named for their characteristic tufts of white facial fur, are native to northwest Colombia. But because of deforestation and illegal pet trade, they’re considered critically endangered, with fewer than 6,000 left in the wild, Peachey told the Idaho Statesman. And their populations continue to decrease. Zoo Boise has implemented the Species Surviv al Plan — a program run by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a nonprofit that accredits U.S. zoos —to help maintain genetically diverse captive populations. The zoo’s involvement in the survival plan entails making a studbook, with important information about each animal that helps zoos find the right breeding partners for them. Specifically, zoos look at mean kinship, which is the average amount of genetic material an individual animal has in common with all others in a population. Zoos then prioritize healthy animals that have less in common with the rest of the population, Peachey said. Parents of the baby cotton-top tamarin, Eddie and Mimi, were matched as part of the Species Survival Plan, Peachey told the Statesman. The new addition to their family is one of four children they’ve had as an effort to diversify populations. “We want the act of visiting the zoo to be a conservation action,” Jeff Agosta, a spokesperson for Zoo Boise, told the Statesman. Peachey said reintroducing animals that were born under human care, like in a zoo, to their wild habitat is the ultimate goal. But for now, it’s important to maintain healthy captive populations. “Genetic diversity is the foundation that animals use to adapt to change. And if these animals were ever reintroduced to the wild, they’re going to face tremendous challenges,” Peachey said. The conservation strategy is a change from past practices, he added, when zoos prioritized producing as many animals as possible over genetic diversity for endangered species, including the cotton-top tamarin. The primate is one of the smallest in the world, with adults weighing 1 pound and babies weighing only 1 ½ ounces. Despite their small size, they serve critical functions in the Colombian forest, like dispersing seeds, pollinating plants and keeping other species populations in check, according to the New England Primate Conservancy, a wildlife conservation organization. For the cotton-top tamarin, captive numbers have been increasing due to the Species Survival Plan, Peachey said. But he also noted the importance of inspiring zoo-goers to care about the animals they’ve seen. A study published in Conservation Biology showed that after people have been to a zoo, they care more about conservation efforts. “How can you not watch them and be concerned about what’s going to happen to this species in the future?” Peachey said. 398 IMAGES What happens when a baby and a monkey are raised together, the most What Happens When You Raise A Chimp With A Baby? Ape and Child Raised Together in Scientific Experiment Baby and chimp raised together in warped experiment that ended in The extraordinary experiment of a chimp raised as a human child Harry Harlow's Baby Monkey Experiment VIDEO feeding beloved baby Hair Red Monkey's maternal instinct is aroused when meets baby monkeys part 2 video of abandoned baby monkey being raised by a man. emotional video Follow the Dad care and development process of Baby monkey AKA (diaper story) Abandoned baby monkey is raised Monkey Dino didnt leave any food for Baby Uwais COMMENTS This Guy Simultaneously Raised a Chimp and a Baby in Exactly the Same They raised the two babies in exactly the same way, in addition to conducting an exhaustive list of scientific experiments that included subjects such as "blood pressure, memory, body size ... Harlow's Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact Based on this observation, Harlow designed his now-famous surrogate mother experiment. In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. Harlow's Monkey Experiments: 3 Findings About Attachment In these experiments, they raised the monkeys in a box, alone, with no sensory contact with other monkeys. They never saw, heard, or came into contact with any other monkeys. The only contact that they had was with a human experimenter, but this was through a one-way screen and remote control; there was no visual input of another living creature. Harry Harlow Monkey Experiments: Cloth Mother vs Wire Mother Experiment 1. Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry toweling cloth. In the first group, the terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle ... These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation Harlow's monkey experiments proved a pivotal turning point in animal research, scientific ethics, and our understanding of primate attachment. ... Harlow set up an experiment that allowed baby ... Harry Harlow Monkey clinging to the cloth mother surrogate in fear test. Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 - December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. Pit of despair The pit of despair was a name used by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow for a device he designed, technically called a vertical chamber apparatus, that he used in experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1970s. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of depression.Researcher Stephen Suomi described the device as "little ... Harlow's Studies on Dependency in Monkeys Harry Harlow shows that infant rhesus monkeys appear to form an affectional bond with soft, cloth surrogate mothers that offered no food but not with wire su... Harry Harlow and the Nature of Love and Affection Harlow's monkey mother experiment was unethical because of the treatment of the infant monkeys. The original monkey mother experiments were unnecessarily cruel. The infant monkeys were deprived of maternal care and social contact. In later experiments, Harlow kept monkeys in total isolation in what he himself dubbed a "pit of despair." Harlow's Monkey Experiment (Definition Harlow's Monkey experiments looked at the influence of parental guidance and interaction during early development. Infant monkeys were placed in isolation, away from their mothers. In other experiments, he took infant monkeys away from their mothers but placed them in a cage with "surrogate" mothers. In both sets of experiments, he found ... Harlow's Monkey Experiment Harlow's monkey experiment tackled both hypotheses: if the bond between mother and child is purely based on physiological need. To do this, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their biological mothers within 6 to 12 hours after being born. He then placed these baby monkeys in a nursery with inanimate 'surrogate' mothers - one who is ... Classics in the History of Psychology -- Harlow (1958) Our surrogate-mother-raised baby monkeys are at first inattentive to her face, as are human neonates to human mother faces. But by 30 days of age ever-increasing responsiveness to the mother's face appears -- whether through learning, maturation, or both -- and we have reason to believe that the face becomes an object of special attention. Adoption History: Harry Harlow, Monkey Love Experiments These monkey love experiments had powerful implications for any and all separations of mothers and infants, including adoption, as well as childrearing in general. In his University of Wisconsin laboratory, Harlow probed the nature of love, aiming to illuminate its first causes and mechanisms in the relationships formed between infants and ... Cruel Experiments on Infant Monkeys Still Happen All the Time--That Raised in total or partial social isolation, clinging desperately to wire or cloth "mothers," rhesus monkey infants subjected to American psychologist Harry F. Harlow's maternal-deprivation ... Gua (chimpanzee) Gua. Gua was a chimpanzee raised as though she were a human child by scientists Luella and Winthrop Kellogg alongside their infant son Donald. Gua was the first chimpanzee to be used in a cross-rearing study in the US. Gua was born on November 15, 1930, in Havana, Cuba. She was given, along with her mother, Pati, and her father, Jack, to the ... 'Project Nim': A Chimp's Very Human, Very Sad Life : NPR Project Nim is the new documentary about a chimpanzee raised in a human household as part of an experiment to see if chimps could learn language. Director James Marsh and two of the people who ... Why "Harlow's Monkey?" In the 1950's, psychologist Harry Harlow began a series of experiments on baby monkeys, depriving them of their biological mothers and using substitute wire and terry cloth covered "mothers". Harlow's goal was to study the nature of attachment and how it affects monkeys who were deprived of their mothers early in life. As an unwitting… What scientists learned when they tried to raise a chimp with a human baby FACT: You can't raise a baby chimpanzee like a tiny human. By Purbita Saha. Brave psychology couple Winthrop and Luella Kellogg gave this experiment a go in the 1930s—and though it led to some ... These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child ... The post These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. ... Harlow set up an experiment that allowed baby monkeys, forcibly separated from their mothers at birth, to ... Harlow monkey experiments (video) Harlow monkey experiments. The Harlow Monkey Experiments tested the bond between mother and child. Baby monkeys preferred a cloth "mother" that provided comfort over a wire "mother" that provided food. This showed that attachment is based more on comfort than nourishment. The cloth "mother" also acted as a secure base, encouraging exploration. The 1931 experiment that paired a newborn chimp with a newborn baby One of the earliest experiments in primate-human similarities took place all the way back in the 1930s, when a baby chimp and a baby human were raised in the same house. Shockingly, it didn't turn ... Harlow's Monkey Experiment & Attachment Theory Harlow's monkey experiment disproved the belief that love is only based on physical needs. The fact that the monkeys grew the most attached to the cloth mother, who satisfied no physical needs of ... In 1931, a baby and a chimp were raised together as part of a bizarre Gua, a female chimpanzee, was raised alongside a human baby as part of a bizarre experiment by scientists Luella and Winthrop Kellogg. The baby was their own son, Donald. The chimpanzee died of pneumonia and the son reportedly killed himself at the age of 43., Viral News, Times Now Baby raised with chimp 'sister' in study with chilling results Extraordinary video footage shows how two scientist parents attempted to raise their infant son alongside a chimpanzee as part of a bizarre nature versus nurture experiment in 1931. Perfect match? See this new baby monkey at Zoo Boise, born for genetic Parents of the baby cotton-top tamarin, Eddie and Mimi, were matched as part of the Species Survival Plan. ... Visitors at Zoo Boise may spot a new addition to its animal family — a miniature white-maned monkey, clinging to the back of a parent or one of its older siblings. ... 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