Harry F. Harlow's Contact Comfort Experiments

In the 1950’s, Harry F. Harlow set out to study the relationship between contact comfort and affection between a mother and her child. Up until this point, love was a topic that was avoided by many psychologists due to its personal nature. What was known was gathered by simple observation, not in-depth studies, and it was a concept thought only to apply to adolescents and adults, not children and infants. Developmental psychologists believed that when an infant initially feels the emotion of love, it is in response to their mother or surrogate mother. After that, infants could learn and generalize affectional responses based on the situation they were in. John B. Watson, a behavioral psychologist, believed love was a natural emotion that grew

Psychoanalysts looked at love by trying to study the nature of its development. They too, believed in erogenous zones. Then, there were people like John Bowlby, who believed love was created due to an infant’s need for intimate physical contact. By the time Harlow arrived on the scene, many psychologists believed that love was created for a mother due to her ability to reduce a primary drive – such as hunger. This created the basis of Harlow’s famous contact comfort experiment (Harlow, 1958).

Methods This experiment was done using baby Macaque monkeys, as human infants had too poor motor skills for the study to work. The two species are very similar, but the monkeys grow faster. With these monkeys, accurate measurements could start between two to ten days after birth, depending on the monkey’s maturity level. Harlow had experimented with these neonatal monkeys three years before doing this study, so he was prepared and knew how to handle them. In his previous studies, he separated sixty baby monkeys from their mothers

It is hard to determine a way for the experiment to have been conducted differently. Perhaps the monkeys could have been treated in a more ethical way, but then again, the article states that the monkeys had better lives than if they would have been raised by their actual mothers (Harlow, 1958). It might be cool to try the experiment with other animals. The Macaque monkey was specifically chosen for this experiment due to its similarity to the human infant (Harlow, 1958). By trying other animals, scientists could see how other species react to contact comfort. Harlow and his associates could have also tried using a different monkey, as perhaps different ones would produce different results in regards to contact comfort. These results are meaningful, and should be able to be applied for all human infants. Studies like this can teach mothers what they should and should not do when raising a