American psychologist Harry Harlow earned a sinister reputation even among his colleagues with his experiments. The paradox is that he thereby obtained data for science that proved the need for more warm attitude people to each other. It happened in the 50s. Initially, Harlow was developing an intelligence test for monkeys. He showed that they are able to solve problems much more complex than the authors thought more early research. While studying rhesus monkeys, Harlow isolated the cubs from their mothers and their peers. It was this circumstance that played a decisive role in the fact that he came across a discovery that brought him fame.

He noticed that the monkeys, when they were separated from their mother, became extremely attached to terry towels, which covered the floor of the cage. They squeezed them in their fists, hugged them and fell into hysterics when the towel was taken away. What's happened? Attachment at that time was understood solely in terms of food reinforcement. The baby loves the mother because she satisfies his hunger. Harlow fed the cubs from his hands, from small bottles. When he removed the bottle, the monkeys simply turned away. But when he tried to take the towel away from them, something completely different happened: the macaques began to squeal hysterically, rushed to the floor and grabbed the towel with a death grip.

Harlow looked at the screaming monkeys and thought about how love is made. An unexpected thought came to him. As his biographer Bloom writes, The best way to understand the heart is to break it.

Soon Harlow began his famous experiments. Using metal shears and a soldering iron, he built a "surrogate mother" out of wire mesh. A nipple was attached to it, from which monkey milk flowed. Also, he made a soft surrogate by wrapping her body terry cloth. The second mother did not have a nipple. Newborn cubs were placed in cages with two surrogate mothers. Adult monkeys whose children were taken from them squealed and beat against the walls of the cages; the kids moaned, once in a separate room. This went on hour after hour, the laboratory filled with cries of despair and the stench: liquid stool, as Harlow wrote, points to a high degree emotional stress.

But then amazing things began to happen. A few days later, the cubs transferred their affection from real mothers, who were now unavailable, to cloth surrogates; they clung to them, crawled over them, caressed their "faces" with their small paws and spent many hours sitting on their backs and stomachs. The cloth mother could not feed them with milk, and when the cubs were hungry, they climbed onto the wire mother, but then returned to the cloth mother again.

After some time, Harlow placed the little monkeys in an unfamiliar room with one of the surrogate mothers. If a nursing mother was with them, the cubs trembled with fear, cried and huddled into a ball on the floor. If there was cloth in the room surrogate mother, their behavior was different: the monkeys felt safe, studied the room and objects located in it with interest.

Harlow gave a talk he called "The Nature of Love" that became a classic: "We were not surprised to find that the comfort that contact brings is the basis of such variables as affection and love, but we did not expect it to completely obscure such a factor as nutrition; Indeed, the difference turned out to be so great that it led to the assumption that the main function of feeding is to ensure frequent and close bodily contact between the cub and its mother... Love for a real mother and a surrogate mother look very similar. As our observations show, the attachment of a monkey cub to a real mother is very strong, but it is in no way inferior to the love that, under experimental conditions, a cub shows to a surrogate mother made of cloth.”

In the years 1930-1950, the theory of education dominated, according to which one should not indulge the child with tactile encouragement, hugging him and taking him in his arms. Harlow showed that the touch of the mother to the child is vital. He presented data that clearly showed that a cloth surrogate mother is more important for babies than a breastfeeding one. His success was triumphant and revolutionized. In 1958, Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association. Filmed about him documentary. His work had an impact on the children's goods industry, especially backpacks that parents could carry their children in. Shelters and maternity changed their policy: a bottle of milk is not enough for a baby, he needs to be picked up, pumped, looked at him and smiled.

However, it soon became clear that everything was more complicated. A surrogate cloth mother provided tactile contact no worse than the real one, but during next year Harlow noticed that the grown monkeys were not quite normal. When he let them out of their cages so they could play with each other and form pairs, they vehemently avoided socializing. The females attacked the males. Some showed something similar to autism: they swayed, bit themselves until they bled and chewed off their own fingers.

In subsequent articles, Harlow courageously acknowledged that the cubs raised by surrogate mothers suffer emotional disturbances, and pointed out that in addition to touching, it is necessary for at least half an hour a day for cubs to play with each other.

To prove this position, he needed observations of dozens of monkeys. The first macaques, raised in isolation, never learned to play and mate. However, the females have reached maturity, their eggs have begun to mature. Harlow wanted to get offspring from them, because he had new idea. He was interested in the question of what kind of mothers these monkeys would turn out to be. All attempts to plant experienced males with them did not bring success - the females clung to their muzzles. Then he came up with a device that he called a “rape frame”: the female fixed in it could not resist the male climbing on her. It brought success. Twenty females became pregnant and produced offspring. Some of them killed their cubs, others were indifferent to them, only a few behaved adequately.

Little boys differ little from young male macaques when choosing toys. Both prefer wheeled vehicles, ignoring dolls and teddy bears. Human girls do not look like monkey cubs: macaques do not have specifically “girlish” toys.

The more time baby Assam monkeys spend playing, the faster their motor skills develop, but the slower they grow. These observations suggest that animals can make time to play, even if it means sacrificing some of the resources they need to grow. This behavior could only be entrenched if the benefit from the skills that games help develop is very high.

Often at the sight small child, a person is overwhelmed with feelings, and he wants to literally eat the baby from tenderness. Some even go on to biting.

Today we will talk about maternal instinct. In the world, perhaps, there is not a single scientist who could clearly formulate the definition of maternal instinct, since the very content of the concept " maternal instinct" undefined.

A group of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital found that women who have pets really feel about them parental feelings. Using magnetic resonance imaging, scientists studied the differences in how women's brains react when they see their children and pets.

It turned out that females prefer those males who take care of the cubs, or at least tolerate them. Males that paid attention to cubs, and it doesn’t matter if they were their own or someone else’s, had offspring 5.6 times more often than males that didn’t pay attention to cubs. Even the "average" calves appeared 2.9 times more often than the gorillas at the bottom of the "list".

Alexander Markov

Children at the age of two and a half years cope with tasks of a "social" nature much better than monkeys, although in solving "physical" problems, chimpanzees and orangutans are in no way inferior to them. This confirms the "cultural intelligence hypothesis", according to which prominent intellectual ability, which distinguish man from animals, have developed in connection with the social way of life and with the requirements of a complex and flexible social organization. Apparently mental capacity of our ancestors in the course of evolution developed unevenly: socially-oriented skills developed first, and the rest “pulled up” later.

Alexander Markov

Small children stubbornly continue to look for a toy in a familiar place, even if it was hidden in front of them. It turned out that children are much less likely to make mistakes if the experimenter hiding the toy does not look at them and does not smile. Apparently, the cause of children's mistakes lies not in the underdevelopment of thinking, but in the innate tendency of children to learn from adults, drawing far-reaching conclusions from the signals received.

Alexander Markov

Almost all children under 3–4 years of age behave like absolute egoists, but by the age of 7–8 they begin to think about others. European psychologists have established that caring for the neighbor in children is due not so much to a disinterested desire to help as to egalitarianism - the desire for equality. Simultaneously with egalitarianism, children develop parochialism - the predominant concern for members of "one's own" social group and this trait is more pronounced in boys than in girls. The results obtained are consistent with the theory that altruism, egalitarianism and parochialism developed in parallel among primitive people under the influence of the same determining factor - frequent intergroup conflicts.

American psychologist Harry Harlow (Harry Harlow) earned his experiments a sinister reputation even among colleagues.

Harry Harlow's experiments with wire monkeys are at the heart of the psychology of attachment. Harlow was able to show that baby monkeys are more attached to a soft surrogate mother than to a metal one, even if they feed them with milk; from this discovery the whole science of touch was born. These experiences, many of which were filmed, leave a chill on the skin and highlight the importance of intimacy in our lives.

The absurdity and paradox of what happened lies in the fact that in this way he obtained important data for science, which proved the urgent need for people to have a warm attitude towards each other. It all started back in the 1950s.

A little biography

Little is known about Harlow's childhood. Judging by his autobiography, his mother showed no warmth towards him. Throughout his life, Harlow experienced bouts of depression, which may have been related to the "distance" that separated him from his mother. Harlow must have yearned for something comforting.
He didn't fit in at school. His favorite pastime as a child was drawing. Harlow portrayed the strange and beautiful country of Yazoo; this country was inhabited by winged and horned creatures. When he finished the painting, he cut the animals in sharp black lines, divided them into halves and quarters, so that the animals lay on the page bloody, but still beautiful, despite vivisection.
After high school, he attended college and completed his education at Stanford University. Harlow, who suffered from a speech impediment, later repeated that no other place made him so unsure of himself. He compensated for this by working like a horse. His teacher was Lewis Theremin, in the laboratory to which he hardly got. He married one of Termen's gifted test subjects.
For the rest of his life, Harlow wondered: what does he have? After all, Clara (his wife) had an IQ of 155. Both in the darkest days and in the moments when he was happy, Harlow always had suspicions that his gifts were fleeting, that he gained them only thanks to a strong, stubborn, strangling grip.
After moving to Madison, Harlow was going to study rats, but began to work with monkeys - rhesus monkeys, small mobile animals. As a student of Theremin, he began by developing a monkey intelligence test; he achieved great success, proving that these animals can solve problems much more complex than the authors of earlier studies thought.
While studying monkeys, Harlow isolated the cubs from their mothers and peers, and it was in doing so that he stumbled upon what made him famous.

monkey love

He examined the heads of the monkeys, but it turned out that he was observing their hearts, and this caused big interest. The cubs, when they were torn from their mothers, became extremely attached to the terry towels, which were spread on the floors of the cage. They lay down on them, squeezed in their arms, screamed if they were taken away. The little monkeys loved their towels. Why?
Attachment was previously understood solely in terms of food rewards. Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence have argued:
All human affection is based on the satisfaction of a need.

Hunger is a basic need, and we strive to satisfy it; the same goes for lust and sex. In the 1930s and 1950s, the theory of satisfaction of needs and its connection with love was not questioned.

Harlow took the towel away from the monkeys, and they began to squeal, and he watched in fascination. As his biographer Bloom writes:

The best way to understand a heart is to break it.

The genetic heritage of rhesus monkeys is approximately 94% identical to that of humans. It is for this reason that psychologists have long used primates in their research.
For his experiment, Harlow made a metal surrogate mother with a single breast in front. A steel nipple was attached to it with a small hole through which monkey milk flowed. He also made a soft surrogate mother by wrapping a cardboard cone with terry cloth.
Newborn macaques were placed in cages with two surrogate mothers: a wiry one full of milk, and a half-smiling cloth one whose breasts were empty. The laboratory assistants kept records that reflected all the traumatic features of the experiment: the mother monkeys, realizing that the cubs had been taken away from them, squealed and beat their heads against the walls of the cages; the kids moaned when they got into a separate room. Hour after hour this bestial nightmare lasted, and the whole laboratory was filled with a stench: loose stools, as Harlow wrote, "indicate a high degree of emotional stress."
However, later the cubs transferred their affection from real mothers, who were now unavailable, to cloth surrogates; she clung to them, crawled over them, bit them affectionately. However, the cloth mother could not feed them, so when the babies were hungry, they rushed to the steel feeding machine. After saturation, they again rushed to the cloth mother.

Harlow established that love grows from touch, not from taste; that is why, when the mother's milk is gone, as it inevitably happens, the child continues to love her, spreading this love, the memory of her in breadth, so that any relationship in the future turns out to be a reproduction of variants of these early tactile impressions.
Harlow went on to suggest that the face is another variable that determines love. The researchers tried to attach a head with a mask to the surrogate mother, but the cub squealed in horror, hid in the corner of the cage and began to sway there, clutching at its own genitals. The researchers moved the figure of the mother towards him, and the cub turned its head to itself with the side where there was no mask, and then showed a willingness to play. No matter how many times the mother's head was turned to face him, he always turned it to the empty side, preferring the face in relation to which the imprinting occurred.

Evil mother

He later built the Iron Maiden. She was a special surrogate mother who put out spikes and doused the cubs with jets of cold air. This, Harlow argued, was an evil mother, and he was interested to know what would happen now.
Harlow made several varieties of Virgos: some evil mothers brought streams down on the cubs cold water, others pricked them. But whatever the torment, the babies did not lose their attachment to their mothers. This behavior cannot be explained by partial reinforcement; there is only dark side touch, the reality of primate relationships that a hug can be lethal.

In 1958, Harry Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association. He went to Washington, ready to take the podium and show his films about monkeys. He gave a speech he called "The Nature of Love".
The children's goods industry came under his influence. After his work, backpacks for parents, adapted for carrying children, became especially widespread. Shelters and maternity hospitals also changed their policy: in addition to a bottle of milk, they now paid more attention to the baby - they picked him up, rocked him, looked at him and smiled.
Something went wrong…

The cloth surrogate mother was as good as the real one, the touch was central to the monkey heart, and yet... Over the next year, Harlow noticed that the cloth mother's cubs were not thriving - this was after he made such a statement to the scientific community!
Grown cubs showed furious unsociableness. Some of them began to show something similar to autism: swaying, biting themselves, biting off their fingers.
Years passed, and the first females raised in isolation matured eggs, they reached puberty, but never learned to play and mate. Harry Harlow was constantly tormented by the question of what kind of mothers these monkeys would turn out to be. That is why he so much wanted to get offspring from them.
Harlow came up with a device that he called a “rape frame”: a female tied to it could not resist the fact that a male climbed on her. This ploy was successful; 20 females became pregnant and brought offspring. Some of the females killed their cubs, others were indifferent to them, only a few behaved “adequately”.
In 1971, Harlow's wife died. Around the same time, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. His eyes seemed to have gone out, their eyelids hung heavy over them; there was a faint smile on her pale, anemic lips. He endured the incident very hard and was forced to undergo a course of electroshock therapy. After treatment, he left the clinic.
The 1960s saw the rise of biological psychiatry. He again decided to continue his research. Harlow wanted to find out what causes depression and what cures it.

Well of Despair

He designed an isolated chamber in which the monkey sat crouched, head down, unable to move and unable to see anything. The experiment lasted up to six weeks; the animal was fed through an opening at the bottom of the chamber, covered with a special screen.
The animal released from the "Well of Despair" had a destroyed psyche, suffered from severe psychosis. No matter what Harlow did, it was not possible to return them to their previous state. there was no cure, no intimacy, no consolation.

Harry Harlow died in 1981 from Parkinson's disease. He couldn't stop the trembling all over his body.

American psychologist Harry Harlow (Harry Harlow) earned his experiments a sinister reputation even among colleagues. The paradox is that he thus obtained data for science that proved the need for a warmer attitude of people towards each other.

The results of the experiment showed previously unacceptable results even in theory. A breastfeeding mother does not evoke such attachment and really love in a child as a "hugging mother". If to formulate more roughly the results of Harlow's numerous experiments, then anyone can feed the baby, he will love (truly love and be tied with bonds of gratitude) only to the one who supplies him with pleasant tactile sensations.

It happened in the 50s. Initially, Harlow was developing an intelligence test for monkeys. He showed that they are able to solve problems much more complex than the authors of earlier studies thought. While studying rhesus monkeys, Harlow isolated the cubs from their mothers and their peers. It was this circumstance that played a decisive role in the fact that he came across a discovery that brought him fame.

He noticed that the monkeys, when they were separated from their mother, became extremely attached to the terry towels with which they covered the floor of the cage. They squeezed them in their fists, hugged them and fell into hysterics when the towel was taken away. What's happened? Attachment at that time was understood solely in terms of food reinforcement. The baby loves the mother because she satisfies his hunger. Harlow fed the cubs from his hands, from small bottles. When he removed the bottle, the monkeys simply turned away. But when he tried to take the towel away from them, something completely different happened: the macaques began to squeal hysterically, rushed to the floor and grabbed the towel with a death grip. Harlow looked at the screaming monkeys and thought about how love is made. An unexpected thought came to him. As his biographer Bloom writes, the best way to understand a heart is to break it.

Soon Harlow began his famous experiments.

Using metal shears and a soldering iron, he built a "surrogate mother" out of wire mesh. A nipple was attached to it, from which monkey milk flowed.

In addition, he made a soft surrogate mother by wrapping her body in terry cloth. The second mother did not have a nipple. Newborn cubs were placed in cages with two surrogate mothers. Adult monkeys whose children were taken from them squealed and beat against the walls of the cages; the kids moaned, once in a separate room. This went on hour after hour, the laboratory filled with cries of despair and the stench: loose stools, as Harlow wrote, indicates a high degree of emotional stress.

But then amazing things began to happen. A few days later, the cubs transferred their affection from real mothers, who were now unavailable, to cloth surrogates; they clung to them, crawled over them, caressed their "faces" with their small paws and spent many hours sitting on their backs and stomachs. The cloth mother could not feed them with milk, and when the cubs were hungry, they climbed onto the wire mother, but then returned to the cloth mother again.

After some time, Harlow placed the little monkeys in an unfamiliar room with one of the surrogate mothers. If a nursing mother was with them, the cubs trembled with fear, cried and huddled into a ball on the floor.

If a fabric surrogate mother was in the room, their behavior was different: the monkeys felt safe, studied the room and the objects in it with interest.

Harlow gave a talk he called "The Nature of Love" that became a classic: "We were not surprised to find that the comfort that contact brings is the basis of such variables as affection and love, but we did not expect it to completely obscure such a factor as nutrition; Indeed, the difference turned out to be so great that it led to the assumption that the main function of feeding is to ensure frequent and close bodily contact between the cub and its mother... Love for a real mother and a surrogate mother look very similar. As our observations show, the attachment of a monkey cub to a real mother is very strong, but it is in no way inferior to the love that, under experimental conditions, a cub shows to a surrogate mother made of cloth.”

In the years 1930-1950, the theory of education dominated, according to which one should not indulge the child with tactile encouragement, hugging him and taking him in his arms. Harlow showed that the touch of the mother to the child is vital. He presented data that clearly showed that a cloth surrogate mother is more important for babies than a breastfeeding one. His success was triumphant and revolutionized. In 1958, Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association. A documentary was made about him. His work had an impact on the children's goods industry, especially backpacks that parents could carry their children in. Shelters and maternity hospitals have changed their policy: a bottle of milk is not enough for a baby, he needs to be picked up, pumped, looked at and smiled.

Something went wrong. The surrogate cloth mother provided tactile contact as good as a real one, but over the next year, Harlow noticed that the grown monkeys were not quite normal. When he let them out of their cages so they could play with each other and form pairs, they vehemently avoided socializing. The females attacked the males. Some showed something similar to autism: they swayed, bit themselves until they bled and chewed off their own fingers.

Harlow was disappointed. Just a year ago, he solemnly announced that he had singled out the main component of education, and now it became clear that he had made a mistake. He started drinking. In subsequent articles, Harlow courageously acknowledged that surrogate-raised cubs suffer from emotional disturbances, and pointed out that in addition to touching, at least half an hour a day of cubs playing with each other is necessary. To prove this position, he needed observations of dozens of monkeys.

The first macaques, raised in isolation, never learned to play and mate. However, the females have reached maturity, their eggs have begun to mature. Harlow wanted to have offspring from them because he had a new idea. He was interested in the question of what kind of mothers these monkeys would turn out to be. All attempts to plant experienced males with them did not bring success - the females clung to their muzzles. Then he came up with a device that he called a “rape frame”: the female fixed in it could not resist the male climbing on her. It brought success. Twenty females became pregnant and produced offspring. Some of them killed their cubs, others were indifferent to them, only a few behaved adequately.

In 1967, Harlow was awarded the National Medal of Science. He was at the peak of his scientific career, from where the only way down. Four years later, his wife died of cancer. He felt devastated and was forced to undergo electroshock therapy at the clinic. For a while, Harlow became a lab animal himself, receiving experimental procedures. After treatment, he returned to the lab and the staff said he was never the same again. He spoke more slowly and stopped joking. He no longer wanted to study deprivation maternal education. He was interested in what causes depression and what can cure it. Harlow was looking for a cure, including for himself.

He designed an isolated chamber in which the monkey sat crouched, head down and unable to see anything. The experiment lasted up to six weeks. The animal was fed through an opening at the bottom of the chamber, covered with a special screen. This device Harlow called the "well of despair." He succeeded in creating a model mental illness. Animals released from the "well of despair" had a destroyed psyche, suffered from severe psychosis. Whatever Harlow does, bring them back to normal condition failed.

Another of Harlow's experimental devices, consisting of a chair rotating at a constant speed of one revolution per minute, and an x-ray machine.

Harlow died in 1981 from Parkinson's disease. “The only thing I appreciate about monkeys,” he said, “is the data I get from them, which I can publish. I don’t like them at all. I don’t like animals at all. I have an aversion to cats. I hate dogs. love monkeys?"

Psychologists do terrible things to animals in their experiments. They always provoke neuroses for them, and even psychoses, in general. But the American psychologist Harry Harlow earned a sinister reputation for his experiments, even among his colleagues. The paradox is that it was with his experiments that he obtained data for science that proved the need for a warmer attitude of people towards each other, and his followers even developed a method to eliminate violations of monkey development. But about them later. First, about Harlow.

It happened in the 50s. Initially, Harlow was developing an intelligence test for monkeys. He showed that they are able to solve problems much more complex than the authors of earlier studies thought.

While studying rhesus monkeys, Harlow isolated the cubs from their mothers and their peers. It was this circumstance that played a decisive role in the fact that he came across a discovery that brought him fame.

He noticed that the monkeys, when they were separated from their mother, became extremely attached to the terry towels with which they covered the floor of the cage. They squeezed them in their fists, hugged them and fell into hysterics when the towel was taken away. What's happened? Attachment at that time was understood solely in terms of food reinforcement. The baby loves the mother because she satisfies his hunger. Harlow fed the cubs from his hands, from small bottles.

When he removed the bottle, the monkeys simply turned away. But when he tried to take the towel away from them, something completely different happened: the macaques began to squeal hysterically, rushed to the floor and grabbed the towel with a death grip. Harlow looked at the screaming monkeys and thought about how love is made. An unexpected thought came to him. As his biographer Bloom writes, the best way to understand a heart is to break it. Soon Harlow began his famous experiments.

Using metal shears and a soldering iron, he built a "surrogate mother" out of wire mesh. A nipple was attached to it, from which monkey milk flowed.

In addition, he made a soft surrogate mother by wrapping her body in terry cloth. The second mother did not have a nipple. Newborn cubs were placed in cages with two surrogate mothers. Adult monkeys whose children were taken from them squealed and beat against the walls of the cages; the kids moaned, once in a separate room. This went on hour after hour, the laboratory filled with cries of despair and the stench: loose stools, as Harlow wrote, indicates a high degree of emotional stress.

But then amazing things began to happen. A few days later, the cubs transferred their affection from real mothers, who were now unavailable, to cloth surrogates; they clung to them, crawled over them, caressed their "faces" with their small paws and spent many hours sitting on their backs and stomachs. The cloth mother could not feed them with milk, and when the cubs were hungry, they climbed onto the wire mother, but then returned to the cloth mother again.

After some time, Harlow placed the little monkeys in an unfamiliar room with one of the surrogate mothers. If a nursing mother was with them, the cubs trembled with fear, cried and huddled into a ball on the floor.

If a fabric surrogate mother was in the room, their behavior was different: the monkeys felt safe, studied the room and the objects in it with interest.

Harlow gave a talk he called "The Nature of Love" that became a classic: "We were not surprised to find that the comfort that contact brings is the basis of such variables as affection and love, but we did not expect it to completely obscure such a factor as nutrition; Indeed, the difference turned out to be so great that it led to the assumption that the main function of feeding is to ensure frequent and close bodily contact between the cub and its mother... Love for a real mother and a surrogate mother look very similar. As our observations show, the attachment of a monkey cub to a real mother is very strong, but it is in no way inferior to the love that, under experimental conditions, a cub shows to a surrogate mother made of cloth.”

In the years 1930-1950, the theory of education dominated, according to which one should not indulge the child with tactile encouragement, hugging him and taking him in his arms. Harlow showed that the touch of the mother to the child is vital. He presented data that clearly showed that a cloth surrogate mother is more important for babies than a breastfeeding one. His success was triumphant and revolutionized. In 1958, Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association. A documentary was made about him. His work had an impact on the children's goods industry, especially backpacks that parents could carry their children in. Shelters and maternity hospitals have changed their policy: a bottle of milk is not enough for a baby, he needs to be picked up, pumped, looked at and smiled.

Something went wrong. The surrogate cloth mother provided tactile contact as good as a real one, but over the next year, Harlow noticed that the grown monkeys were not quite normal. When he let them out of their cages so they could play with each other and form pairs, they vehemently avoided socializing. The females attacked the males. Some showed something similar to autism: they swayed, bit themselves until they bled and chewed off their own fingers.

Harlow was disappointed. Just a year ago, he solemnly announced that he had singled out the main component of education, and now it became clear that he had made a mistake. He started drinking. In subsequent articles, Harlow courageously acknowledged that surrogate-raised cubs suffer from emotional disturbances, and pointed out that in addition to touching, at least half an hour a day of cubs playing with each other is necessary. To prove this position, he needed observations of dozens of monkeys.

The first macaques, raised in isolation, never learned to play and mate. However, the females have reached maturity, their eggs have begun to mature. Harlow wanted to have offspring from them because he had a new idea. He was interested in the question of what kind of mothers these monkeys would turn out to be. All attempts to plant experienced males with them did not bring success - the females clung to their muzzles. Then he came up with a device that he called a “rape frame”: the female fixed in it could not resist the male climbing on her. It brought success. Twenty females became pregnant and produced offspring. Some of them killed their cubs, others were indifferent to them, only a few behaved adequately.

In 1967, Harlow was awarded the National Medal of Science. He was at the peak of his scientific career, from where the only way down. Four years later, his wife died of cancer. He felt devastated and was forced to undergo electroshock therapy at the clinic. For a while, Harlow became a lab animal himself, receiving experimental procedures. After treatment, he returned to the lab and the staff said he was never the same again. He spoke more slowly and stopped joking. He no longer wanted to study the deprivation of mothering. He was interested in what causes depression and what can cure it. Harlow was looking for a cure, including for himself.

He designed an isolated chamber in which the monkey sat crouched, head down and unable to see anything. The experiment lasted up to six weeks. The animal was fed through an opening at the bottom of the chamber, covered with a special screen. This device Harlow called the "well of despair." He was quite successful in creating a model of mental illness. Animals released from the "well of despair" had a destroyed psyche, suffered from severe psychosis. No matter what Harlow did, it was not possible to return them to normal.

Harlow died in 1981 from Parkinson's disease. “The only thing I appreciate about monkeys,” he said, “is the data I get from them, which I can publish. I don't like them at all. I don't like animals in general. I have an aversion to cats. I hate dogs. How can you love monkeys?

However, his followers, who were still studying the behavior of monkeys and looking for an opportunity for experimental subjects to at least partially correct the damage caused to them by the absence of normal maternal warmth psychological trauma- at the beginning of our century, they nevertheless found a way to restore the disturbed development of monkeys.

Ecology of Cognition: American psychologist Harry Harlow has earned a sinister reputation for his experiments, even among his colleagues. The paradox is that he thus obtained data for science that proved the need for a warmer attitude of people towards each other.

American psychologist Harry Harlow (Harry Harlow) earned his experiments a sinister reputation even among colleagues. The paradox is that he thus obtained data for science that proved the need for a warmer attitude of people towards each other. It happened in the 50s. Initially, Harlow was developing an intelligence test for monkeys. He showed that they are able to solve problems much more complex than the authors of earlier studies thought.

While studying rhesus monkeys, Harlow isolated the cubs from their mothers and their peers. It was this circumstance that played a decisive role in the fact that he came across a discovery that brought him fame.

He noticed that the monkeys, when they were separated from their mother, became extremely attached to the terry towels with which they covered the floor of the cage. They squeezed them in their fists, hugged them and fell into hysterics when the towel was taken away. What's happened? Attachment at that time was understood solely in terms of food reinforcement. The baby loves the mother because she satisfies his hunger. Harlow fed the cubs from his hands, from small bottles.

When he removed the bottle, the monkeys simply turned away. But when he tried to take the towel away from them, something completely different happened: the macaques began to squeal hysterically, rushed to the floor and grabbed the towel with a death grip. Harlow looked at the screaming monkeys and thought about how love is made. An unexpected thought came to him. As his biographer Bloom writes, the best way to understand a heart is to break it. Soon Harlow began his famous experiments.

Using metal shears and a soldering iron, he built a "surrogate mother" out of wire mesh. A nipple was attached to it, from which monkey milk flowed.

In addition, he made a soft surrogate mother by wrapping her body in terry cloth. The second mother did not have a nipple. Newborn cubs were placed in cages with two surrogate mothers. Adult monkeys whose children were taken from them squealed and beat against the walls of the cages; the kids moaned, once in a separate room. This went on hour after hour, the laboratory filled with cries of despair and the stench: loose stools, as Harlow wrote, indicates a high degree of emotional stress.

But then amazing things began to happen. A few days later, the cubs transferred their affection from real mothers, who were now unavailable, to cloth surrogates; they clung to them, crawled over them, caressed their "faces" with their small paws and spent many hours sitting on their backs and stomachs. The cloth mother could not feed them with milk, and when the cubs were hungry, they climbed onto the wire mother, but then returned to the cloth mother again.

After some time, Harlow placed the little monkeys in an unfamiliar room with one of the surrogate mothers. If a nursing mother was with them, the cubs trembled with fear, cried and huddled into a ball on the floor.

If a fabric surrogate mother was in the room, their behavior was different: the monkeys felt safe, studied the room and the objects in it with interest.

Harlow gave a talk he called "The Nature of Love" that became a classic: "We were not surprised to find that the comfort that contact brings is the basis of such variables as affection and love, but we did not expect it to completely obscure such a factor as nutrition; Indeed, the difference turned out to be so great that it led to the assumption that the main function of feeding is to ensure frequent and close bodily contact between the cub and its mother... Love for a real mother and a surrogate mother look very similar. As our observations show, the attachment of a monkey cub to a real mother is very strong, but it is in no way inferior to the love that, under experimental conditions, a cub shows to a surrogate mother made of cloth.”

In the years 1930-1950, the theory of education dominated, according to which one should not indulge the child with tactile encouragement, hugging him and taking him in his arms. Harlow showed that the touch of the mother to the child is vital. He presented data that clearly showed that a cloth surrogate mother is more important for babies than a breastfeeding one. His success was triumphant and revolutionized. In 1958, Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association. A documentary was made about him. His work had an impact on the children's goods industry, especially backpacks that parents could carry their children in. Shelters and maternity hospitals have changed their policy: a bottle of milk is not enough for a baby, he needs to be picked up, pumped, looked at and smiled.

Something went wrong. The surrogate cloth mother provided tactile contact as good as a real one, but over the next year, Harlow noticed that the grown monkeys were not quite normal. When he let them out of their cages so they could play with each other and form pairs, they vehemently avoided socializing. The females attacked the males. Some showed something similar to autism: they swayed, bit themselves until they bled and chewed off their own fingers.

Harlow was disappointed. Just a year ago, he solemnly announced that he had singled out the main component of education, and now it became clear that he had made a mistake. He started drinking. In subsequent articles, Harlow courageously acknowledged that surrogate-raised cubs suffer from emotional disturbances, and pointed out that in addition to touching, at least half an hour a day of cubs playing with each other is necessary. To prove this position, he needed observations of dozens of monkeys.

The first macaques, raised in isolation, never learned to play and mate. However, the females have reached maturity, their eggs have begun to mature. Harlow wanted to have offspring from them because he had a new idea. He was interested in the question of what kind of mothers these monkeys would turn out to be. All attempts to plant experienced males with them did not bring success - the females clung to their muzzles. Then he came up with a device that he called a “rape frame”: the female fixed in it could not resist the male climbing on her. It brought success. Twenty females became pregnant and produced offspring. Some of them killed their cubs, others were indifferent to them, only a few behaved adequately.

In 1967, Harlow was awarded the National Medal of Science. He was at the peak of his scientific career, from where the only way down. Four years later, his wife died of cancer. He felt devastated and was forced to undergo electroshock therapy at the clinic. For a while, Harlow became a lab animal himself, receiving experimental procedures. After treatment, he returned to the lab and the staff said he was never the same again. He spoke more slowly and stopped joking. He no longer wanted to study the deprivation of mothering. He was interested in what causes depression and what can cure it. Harlow was looking for a cure, including for himself.