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Open any Introductory Psychology textbook published since 1960, start thumbing through the pages, and most likely you will come across a photograph of a rhesus monkey infant clinging to a cloth-covered dummy adjacent to another dummy, this one with a wire surface and a protruding milk-filled bottle. Along with the photo will be a description of Harry Harlow’s classic ‘surrogate mother’ experiments, in which he dramatically demonstrated that tactile contact was more important than feeding in establishing a monkey infant’s bond to its surrogate. Harlow’s conclusions from these studies, that ‘there is more to mother love than mere milk’ (Harlow 1958), had important and lasting consequences. They effectively demolished the prevailing theoretical consensus that an infant’s primary social relationship is formed as a direct consequence of the feeding process, be it through oral gratification, as advocated by orthodox psychoanalysts, or by its reinforcement history, the contemporary behaviorist view. More importantly, Harlow’s findings also provided compelling empirical support for specific biological foundations underlying Bowlby’s attachment theory, which went on to become the predominant view of social and emotional development over the latter third of the twentieth century. But Harlow’s contributions to, and influences on, both psychology and a remarkably diverse range of other disciplines went far beyond his legacy as the father of the surrogate mother. His numerous ground breaking discoveries over a lifetime of research with monkeys have not only stood the test of time and scientific debate, but indeed provided the very basis for many new areas of scientific inquiry that still remain active in the year 2001.
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Harry F. Harlow was born Harry F. Israel on October 31, 1905 in Fairfield, Iowa, where he spent his childhood years. He left this small Midwestern town to go to college, initially matriculating at Reed College for a year (as an English major) before transferring to Stanford University, where he changed his major and then earned both his BA (1927) and Ph.D. (1930) in psychology. His graduate advisors at Stanford, concerned that his family name might restrict his academic employment opportunities during a time of economic depression and latent anti-Semitism, suggested a name change. Harlow obliged, and later in life he often quipped that they had given him not only his degree but his very name as well. In the fall of 1930 he was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he remained for the rest of his professional career. Following his retirement in 1974 Harlow moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he served as a Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona until his death on December 3, 1981.
Although Harlow’s graduate training in comparative psychology had been largely limited to research with rodents, he began working with non-human primates shortly after his arrival at Wisconsin, carrying out his initial studies with a variety of monkeys and apes then residing in Madison’s public zoo. He quickly discovered that the standard types of conditioning and memory tests then being used in studies with rats or pigeons were simply not adequate to tap the considerable cognitive capabilities of his non-human primate subjects. He and his students therefore began creating new tasks and test batteries that were substantially more challenging. Shortly after moving into his own laboratory building on the University campus, Harlow designed and built the first prototype of a apparatus that would profoundly alter the course of research in primate cognition and that continues to be used in primate laboratories around the world in the year 2001. This testing device was named the Wisconsin General Test Apparatus (WGTA); it enabled an experimenter to present a large number of discrete learning and memory tasks in a rapid and highly standardized fashion to subject after subject (Harlow and Bromer 1938). At the same time, he began directing most of his efforts away from broad cross-species comparisons to more focused studies using a single species—the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta), an unusually hardy and adaptive species that thrived in captivity.
Armed with a laboratory specifically designed to house and test primates, in which individual monkeys could be maintained in good physical health for year after year, and a testing apparatus that enabled the same monkey to be tested repeatedly under standardized conditions, Harlow began changing the field of animal learning. In the 1940s he and his students created a battery of learning and memory tasks that provided a standardized ‘intelligence test’ for his monkeys. He then proceeded to study cortical localization of learning capabilities by lesioning different brain areas and recording subsequent differential patterns of deficits across the various components of the test battery. This research established his credentials as a physiological psychologist and it opened up areas of inquiry and an experimental methodology that continue to be pursued in neuroscience research. In 1949 Harlow made a major conceptual and methodological breakthrough with his discovery of ‘learning sets’ in rhesus monkeys. He found that monkeys presented with a long series of six-trial two choice discrimination problems soon learned to achieve near-perfect performance on the second and all subsequent trials of each problem. This demonstrated unequivocally that the monkeys had acquired a general strategy for problem solution, i.e., an abstract concept (in his words, ‘learning to learn’), rather than a product of simple associative learning (Harlow 1949). This finding rendered untenable the neo-Decartes characterization of animals as ‘reflex machines,’ and it ultimately has led to increasingly more sophisticated studies of primate cognitive capabilities that foster direct comparisons with those of young human subjects. Largely because of this discovery, Harlow was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1951.
Harlow became interested in the ontogeny of rhesus monkey cognitive capabilities in the early 1950s when he developed a program of research designed to precisely establish when specific cognitive capabilities first emerged during development and when they subsequently achieved adult levels. He demonstrated that infant monkeys could be both classically and operantly conditioned and performed associative learning tests at adult levels as early in life as such tests could be administered. In contrast, monkeys did not achieve adult levels of performance on more abstract problems such as learning set and oddity until their juvenile and adolescent years, respectively (Harlow 1959). In the process of carrying out these studies he also observed that young monkeys would solve problems and otherwise engage their physical environment in the absence of appetite rewards. This led him to conclude that in many circumstances curiosity was a more powerful motivator than a reduction of any primary drive (Harlow 1953). These observations provided the conceptual foundation for the ‘surrogate mother’ studies cited above.
In the 1960s Harlow shifted the major focus of his research from primate cognition to the development of social behavior, both normal and abnormal. He developed the concept of ‘affectional systems,’ in which he characterized emerging relationships formed by monkey infants with their mothers, peers, and others in the social group as differing in qualitative fashion and serving complementary roles in the socialization process (Harlow and Harlow 1965). He and his students also studied the consequences of blocking the formation of different affectional systems via various degrees and duration of social deprivation initiated at birth (Harlow and Harlow 1962, 1969). These studies established convincingly the importance of early social experiences for the development of species-normative adult social activities, including reproduction and maternal behavior, and they provided the conceptual and methodological basis for current studies of early experience effects on brain as well as behavior. In recognition for this research Harlow was awarded the National Medal of Science, America’s highest official scientific award, in 1967.
Harlow continued his investigations of abnormal behavior during his final years at Wisconsin, generating two more areas of research in the process. First, he and his students demonstrated that the devastating behavioral consequences of total social isolation for the first 6 months or year of life, previously thought to be permanent, could be largely reversed by exposing the monkeys upon emergence from isolation to conspecific ‘therapists’ deliberately chosen to not only be socially normal but chronologically younger than the isolates themselves (Suomi and Harlow 1972, Novak and Harlow 1975). These findings directly refuted a strict ‘critical period’ interpretation of social deprivation effects, providing compelling evidence of developmental plasticity and once again opening up a new area of study that remains at the forefront of developmental neuroscience research today. At the same time, Harlow set out to create a rhesus monkey model of human affective disorders, relying on earlier observations by Rene Spitz and Bowlby that certain forms of social deprivation were associated with infant and childhood depression. He and his students used a variety of social separation procedures to precipitate analogous behavioral states in young monkeys and then employed both social and pharmacological interventions to reverse to behavioral disorders (Harlow and Suomi 1974, Suomi and Harlow 1977). In recognition of these efforts, Harlow received the Kittay Scientific Award in 1975, the most prestigious award in the field of psychiatry at that time.
Harlow’s influence on the field of psychology extended far beyond his empirical contributions, which resulted in over 323 original scientific publications over his 40-year career (a complete Bibliography: of Harlow’s works may be found in Suomi and LeRoy 1982). He served as Editor for the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology for over a quarter century. He also took an active role in many scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Society for Experimental Psychology, and the American Psychological Association, for which he was elected President in 1958. Harlow served as the Chief Psychologist for the US Army during the Korean War, and he subsequently was appointed to numerous US government planning and review committees. He played a major role in the establishment of the US Regional Primate Research Center System in the early 1960s and was instrumental in establishing the University of Wisconsin as the site for one of the 7 original Centers, which he directed from 1964 from 1971.
Despite all of his research activities and administrative responsibilities, Harlow maintained an active teaching role throughout his career. Not only did he train numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (a total of 35 students completed their Ph.D. dissertations under his tutelage), but he was also legendary as an undergraduate instructor, especially for Introductory Psychology, which he taught nearly every year during his tenure at Wisconsin. In addition, Harlow worked hand-in-hand with veterinary and technical personnel to establish numerous basic advances in primate husbandry, including the development of the first self-sufficient primate colony, the first large-scale primate neonatal nursery, and various quarantine and screening procedures that are still used.
Harlow was a colorful character who enjoyed dealing with controversy. He delighted in generating empirical findings that directly challenged existing theoretical dogma. In addition to his considerable skills as a writer and editor, he was a gifted public speaker, who for years was one of the most sought-after scientific lecturers in the country. As a result, he was able to present his findings not only to psychologists around the world but also to representatives of numerous other scientific disciplines, as well as to lay audiences. Indeed, 20 years after his death Harlow’s scientific contributions were still cited not only by comparative, physiological, developmental, cognitive, and clinical psychologists but also by others in fields ranging from anthropology to zoology. Clearly, he was much more than the ‘father of the cloth mother.’
Bibliography:
- Harlow H F 1949 The formation of learning sets. Psychological Review 56: 51–65
- Harlow H F 1953 Mice, monkeys, men, and motives. Psycho- logical Review 60: 23–32
- Harlow H F 1958 The nature of love. American Psychologist 13: 673–85
- Harlow H F 1959 The development of learning in the rhesus monkey. American Scientist 47: 459–79
- Harlow H F, Bromer J 1938 A test-apparatus for monkeys. Psychological Record 2: 434–6
- Harlow H F, Harlow M K 1962 Social deprivation in monkeys. Scientific American 207: 136–46
- Harlow H F, Harlow M K 1965 The affectional systems. In: Schrier A J, Harlow H F, Stollnitz F (eds.) Behavior of Nonhuman Primates. Academic Press, New York, Vol. II pp. 287–334
- Harlow H F, Harlow M K 1969 Effects of various mother-infant relationships on rhesus monkeys behaviors. In: Foss B M (eds.) Determinants of Infant Behaviour. Methuen, London, Vol. IV pp. 15–36
- Harlow H F, Suomi S J 1974 Induced depression in monkeys. Behavioral Biology 12: 273–96
- Novak M A, Harlow H F 1975 Social recovery of monkeys isolated for the first year of life: 1. Rehabilitation and therapy. Developmental Psychology 11: 453–65
- Suomi S J, Harlow H F 1972 Social rehabilitation of isolate reared monkeys. Developmental Psychology 6: 487–96
- Suomi S J, Harlow H F 1977 Production and alleviation of depressive behaviors in monkeys. In: Maser J, Seligman M E P (eds.) Psychopathology: Experimental Models. W H Freeman, San Francisco, CA pp. 131–73
- Suomi S J, LeRoy H A 1982 In memoriam: Harry F. Harlow (1905–1981). American Journal of Primatology 2: 319–42
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