Monkey Love Experiments: A Psychological Analysis

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For this week’s topic, I wanted to start off with truly taking a look at what is psychology and why is it important? What it comes down to is, psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and how it functions. Thus, allowing for mental and emotional factors to occur and govern a situation, activity or behavior in a given context. In turn, based on external factors of life, they may benefit or hinder our experiences and how we interpret them in the future. Take for example a dog and or child that has been starved. When food is set in front of them, regardless of what it is, they tend to scarf it down as fast as they can, many of times so fast, they make themselves sick. This is because their psychological thought process tells them they …show more content…

Harlow (an American psychologist), Monkey Love Experiments. Within these experiments Harry Harlow uses two surrogate mothers to raise monkeys, a terry cloth mother and a bare wire mother. Within this study, we can see the perfect example of how psychological factors can impact the overall outcome. Within the study, each baby monkey became attached to its designated mother, distinguishing its unique face and favoring it above all others. Next, came the time to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare-wire mothers or cloth-covered mothers. Within this experiment, he offered the infants a clothed mother and a wire mother under two conditions. Situation 1: the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In situation 2, the cloth mother held the bottle, and the wire mother had nothing. Each time, the monkies preferred the cloth mother regardless of if she had food or not. This shows that psychologically they were drawn to contact comfort as it became known that this is was essential to the psychological development and health throughout life. This can be correlated to sports in the sense that we as humans constantly crave praise and comfort. In turn, we can be tailored to go a certain direction, if we think that it will bring us that level of satisfaction as the end …show more content…

Nevertheless, when stress occurs, our fight or flight responses become engaged, and in turn, we become more alert. In doing so, this causes us to search and create a solution. More so, low-level stressors arouse the creation of brain chemicals called neurotrophins, and strengthen the connections between neurons in the brain (for example, why productivity and concentration is more heavily enhanced in those who exercise more often. Thus, experience frequent, low-level

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