HOME READING REPORT 1

I read articles that are associated with psychology very often. And recently, I have found one of
them really interesting, a psychological study about human development and love. Though it
discusses quite an obvious fact, it really interested me.

So this study was called “The nature of love” and was conducted by the psychologist Harry
Harlow in 1958. Most people would say that their first experience with love was the bond
between them and their mother. The idea of this study was to discover what exactly this bond is
that the connection between a child and its mother is so crucial.

According to Freud – another psychologist, this bond was focused around the importance of
breast and feeding by breast through the first year of the child’s life. As being an infant, the child
was given all the basic needs by the mother: food and care. And that’s why, in the child’s mind,
the mother becomes associated with pleasurable things, and there develops “love”.

In the study, Harlow decided to place an infant where the mother does not provide all the basic
needs, and some various components can be manipulated, in order to discover this bond between
child and mother.

For ethical reasons, this study couldn’t be done on human, so Harlow did this on rhesus monkeys,
as they are very similar to humans biologically.

Two kind of mothers were built for this study. The first one (cloth mother) was equipped with a
breast-like structure in the chest area to provide milk, and consisted of a very smooth covering
with a light bulb inside which provided warmth. The second mother (wire mother) was equipped
with the same milk-providing structure, was also able to provide warmth, but it was made of wire
mesh. Two mothers were the same except that the wire mother couldn’t provide what we call
“contact comfort”.

Each mother was feeding 4 infant monkeys in the first 5 months, and regardless of which mother
fed them, all 8 monkeys were spending nearly all their time with the cloth mother, who provided
comfort.

Then, Harlow put objects that caused a fearful reaction in the cages, all the monkeys ran to the
cloth mother and clang to it for comfort and protection.

Next, the monkeys were placed in the strange room with strange objects in 3 situations: cloth
mother present, no mother present and wire mother present. When the cloth mother was present,
the monkeys immediately rushed to it and clutched it, rubbed their body against it. Before
exploring each new object, they ran to the cloth mother. When no mother was present, the
monkeys freezed with fear, expressed some emotional behaviour like crying and ran to the part of
the room where the cloth mother often stands. And surprisingly, when the wire mother was
present, the monkeys’ reaction was exactly the same as if no mother was present.

Finally, after 6 months of being close to the cloth mother, the monkeys were seperated the mother
for short periods and then reunited in the room with strange objects. After the longest period of
30 days, the monkeys rushed to the mother, climed on it, and played with it (biting and tearing at
the cloth cover). The monkeys did not leave the mother to explore the strange objects like they
did before. So according to Harlow, the need for contact comfort was greater than the natural
tendency for exploration.