Open Field Test Summary

Contact with parents and peers was necessary for the development of normal adult heterosexual and parental systems. In work designed to develop systems of therapy, Harlow and his associates found that, whereas contact with age mates worsened the depression characteristic of isolated youngsters, younger animals could serve as effective therapists. In the final extension of this work, Harlow began producing pathological symptoms in adult monkeys in an effort to understand the etiology of various mental disorders. Successive experiments concluded that infants used the surrogate as a base for exploration and a source of comfort and protection in novel and even frightening situations. In an experiment called the "open-field test", an infant was

Without the mother, the infants cowered and avoided the object. When the surrogate mother was present, however, the infant did not show great fearful responses and often contacted the device—exploring and attacking it.
Another study looked at the differentiated effects of being raised with only either a wire mother or a cloth mother. Both groups gained weight at equal rates, but the monkeys raised on a wire mother had softer stool and trouble digesting the milk, frequently suffering from diarrhea. Harlow's interpretation of this behavior, which is still widely accepted, was that a lack of contact comfort is psychologically stressful to the monkeys and the digestive problems are a physiological manifestation of that stress. The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the traditional advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children and the insistence of the predominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. The insistence of the predominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother-child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea