Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  When mothers delicately shift their children into other relationships, they also shift them into new levels of social learning. As Harry pointed out, there’s a simple name for the next phase in building relationships. It’s called play and it’s one reason why it is so important that parents encourage their children to form friendships with peers. When does play with peers become a major part of social life? In monkeys, it begins at about three or four months—comparable to a human toddler of two years. Watching the lively macaques, it was clear to Harry that to play well, a whole new set of social skills was required. Game playing between peers, obviously, doesn’t look much like a mother-child relationship. But in the Wisconsin lab then—and in experiments that continue today—observers were often startled by how closely childhood play could resemble adult interactions. The parallel was strong enough, as Harry speculated, to suggest that play is a kind of “prototype” for adult interactions, a test run for the future.

  Monkey play at his lab tended to go in two primary directions. One was “rough and tumble play”—what Harry described as a monkey wrestling match—with lots of rolling and scraping and almost no injury. This is between friends, after all, so no one pounds all that hard. The alternate favorite game was something similar to what we call “tag” and scientists call “approach-avoidance play”—chasing, running away, very little actual physical contact. At one level of observation, you could watch monkeys do this and see a wonderfully rowdy time. At another level, you could see a really terrific way to pick up a few fundamental life skills.

  In rough-and-tumble play, a child learns judgment—how far to push without getting hurt, who is going to take the game too seriously, when to back off, when to push forward. Tag, too, lets you judge speed, interest, who’s going to run, who might decide to stand back, who’s a good sport or a bad loser. And both games teach you another equally important life lesson: pleasure in the company of others.

  As the monkeys grow older and play harder, they get better at sending and at reading the kind of messages that we call nonverbal communication. Peers tend to reinforce behaviors—reciprocating when they like an activity, ignoring or turning away when they don’t. So during play, you can also learn what makes your friends leave and how to coax them back. Most of us want them back. Rhesus macaques and their human cousins aren’t built to be loners. Reconciliation, among other skills, matters. We do best, live longest and happiest, when the social net stretches firmly beneath us and we, in turn, serve as strands in the adjoining nets that protect our friends and family.

  The Harlow lab put the idea of a complex social network to the test in a study devised by Peggy Harlow. In the midst of the mother love studies, Peggy had been thinking about family itself, the basic support system of home—mother, father, and children, all together. To do that with the rhesus—not a monogamous species in any way— she had to find a way to keep the father at home. Her “nuclear family apparatus” had nothing to do with natural rhesus society, in which females care for the young and fathers move on to other, less needy company. Peggy’s apparatus was designed to ask something of rhesus macaques that they never gave—permanence, togetherness in parenting, a stable home, and what Harry jokingly called “blissful monogamy.”

  The design was for a neighborhood of four macaque families. The Wisconsin lab workers converted an attic of the primate lab into this community. Each cage-house sheltered a mother, a father, and their children. Each house opened onto a central playground equipped with climbing ladders, swings, and toys. From the playground, then, you could visit any of the neighbors—if you were a child. All the doors were the right size for small monkeys only. Mom and Dad couldn’t get through. The young monkeys had the run of the place. They lived in a child’s neighborhood. The little animals could play together, they could hang out at a friend’s house, they could scamper for home if alarmed or tired. Their parents would always be home.

  The Wisconsin psychologists worried that the big males, trapped with their children and only one mate, would turn mean and abusive. But the monkeys surprised everyone. It turned out that even an arrogant alpha macaque could find untapped potential in the right circumstances. “What was really astonishing was that the males then took part in protection and rearing,” says Gerry Ruppenthal, now at the University of Pittsburgh, who worked with Peggy on the nuclear family project. “At that point, the thought was that a male rhesus didn’t interact kindly with anyone. And she proved them wrong.”

  The big males anxiously guarded the smaller animals. At home, they played with them with surprising cheerfulness. They tolerated those annoying kid behaviors—pinching, biting, and tail and ear pulling—that might have angered them in the more free-ranging colonies. In another life, the burly male monkeys might have knocked the baby monkeys far, far away. But in this life, they often settled for a shrug, the monkey equivalent of rolling their eyes.

  The young monkeys thrived in this lively community of family and friend. Harry would remark that of all the animals in his laboratory, these were the most confident, the most socially adept, the most outgoing—and, surprisingly, the smartest. Monkeys raised in the nuclear family community were faster and more accurate on the most difficult tests of the WGTA. Their minds seemed sharper and more flexible, as if learning to handle a multitude of social relationships had built their brains to handle other challenges well, too.

  Can one strong relationship ever substitute for such social complexity?

  In one later test of this, Harry and his students decided to push the limits of a single-relationship life. They didn’t even consider cloth mom for this study. They kept the baby monkeys with their living, breathing, interactive biological mothers. The catch was this: Mother and baby were separated from the rest of the colony. They had no one else for six months; there was no chance for that lively interaction with playmates. They grew up obsessively and abnormally shy. Even when surrounded by other young monkeys later, the single-relationship monkeys avoided them. They didn’t want to play. They rarely groomed and befriended their new companions. When approached, they tended to be hysterically defensive; in the terminology of the lab, hyperaggressive. “In short,” Harry reported dryly, “they do not make good playmates.” And the longer the baby was isolated with his mother, the more inept he became at making friends—not unlike David Levy’s overprotected children back in the 1930s.

  Harry’s lab would prove the paradoxical nature of love. The one, the only relationship, isn’t enough. And yet, the one, the first relationship can be everything, swamp everything. That the first attachment, interactive relationship, social connection, call it what you will, is so potent has less to do with mother than with child. Joseph Stone’s description of a baby’s intense attraction to a parent was addiction—and that may well be exactly the word, although no scientific term really does justice to the blinding, white-light intensity of commitment that a young child will give to a parent.

  In their exploration of love, in all its shapes, Harry and his students would illustrate this precisely—and painfully. Joseph Stone also would include these latter findings in The Competent Infant as an essential part of the baby story. These studies, as well as the gentler ones, helped transform the landscape of child development research, and they remain essential. Still, it is genuinely hard, even now, to read these particular testaments to baby love. Even in small black print on the yellowing pages of fading scientific reprints, they make all too real the wholehearted nature of what a child gives a parent. In their give-everything vulnerability, they are yet word-by-word painful to read.

  The work in question didn’t begin as a test of commitment but as an experiment to investigate the effect of a pathological mother on her child. To do the study, the lab team built what Harry called evil or “monster” mothers. There were four of them and they were cloth moms gone crazy. All of them had a soft-centered body for cuddling. But they were, all of them, booby traps. One was a “shaking” mother who rocked so violently that, Harry said, the teeth
and bones of the infant chattered in unison. The second was an air-blast mother. She blew compressed air against the infant with such force that the baby looked, Harry said, as if it would be denuded. The third had an embedded steel frame that, on schedule or demand, would fling forward and hurl the infant monkey off the mother’s body. The fourth monster mother had brass spikes (blunt-tipped) tucked into her chest; these would suddenly, unexpectedly push against the clinging child.

  And what did the babies do when all this happened? If possible, they clung tighter. At least, that was the response of the little monkeys with the airblast and the shaking mothers. The other monster mothers could successfully remove the infants by the force of the spikes or by literally throwing them off. But those baby animals, as soon as they safely could, returned and hugged their mothers again. Time after time, the babies came back, Harry wrote, “expressing faith and love as if all were forgiven.” The experiment did not, in fact, create psychopathic monkeys. It created neurotic ones, yes, but not crazy ones. Its primary finding was entirely different from the expected result: “No experiment could have better demonstrated the power of any contact-comfort-giving mother to provide solace and security to her infant.”

  Or, to turn it around, no experiment could have better demonstrated the depth and strength of a baby’s addiction for her parent. Or how terrifyingly vulnerable that addiction makes a child. These little monkeys would be frightened away by brass spike mom—and yet it was she they turned to for comfort. They had to; she was what they had. Here indeed was further evidence of that haven-of-security effect, for better and for worse. It doesn’t always keep you safe. If your mother is your only source of comfort and your mother is evil, what choices are left you in seeking safe harbor? No choice except to keep trying to cast anchor in the only harbor available.

  Harry and his team would find the same pattern when real mother monkeys were rejecting or abusive. The scientists marveled at “the desperate efforts the babies made to contact their mothers. No matter how abusive the mothers were, the babies persisted in returning.” They returned more often, they reached and clung and coaxed far more frequently than the children of normal mothers. The infants were so preoccupied with engaging their mothers that they had little energy for friends. The clinging babies’ energy was directed into their attempts to coax a little affection out at home. Sometimes the real monkey mothers did respond, gradually, more kindly. But while trying to reach mother, the little monkeys never had time to reach anyone else. “Like most human children, young monkeys play poorly when they are frightened, unhappy, or preoccupied with their mothers’ activities,” says Suomi. And playing poorly meant that the other monkeys didn’t always want to play with them. It was a typical childhood reaction: You aren’t any fun; you might as well go home and be with that mother of yours.

  In one of the Harlow essays, included in The Competent Infant, Harry addresses this issue in the most scientific way: “All infants show the filial affectional system, and they all show it in the same way. On the other hand, by any measure of maternal behavior, the maternal affectional system shows high variation.” Translated to everyday language, the first part of that statement means that almost all parents are guaranteed that their babies will love them. The second part is a reminder that the baby has no guarantee at all of being loved in return. Love, as science so directly reminds us, as Harry and his studies illustrated with such knife-edged precision, can never be taken for granted—not on the first day we draw breath, not ever.

  EIGHT

  The Baby in the Box

  When one accepts propinquity / instead of chilling dignity / a life becomes depression free / as every life should always be.

  Harry F. Harlow, undated

  WHEN HARRY FIRST BEGAN exploring love, there was a leaping sense of joyfulness to his discoveries. This was wondrous, amazing science, and even the lead researcher himself wasn’t immune to its dazzle. When the barely submerged poet in him broke into verse, he composed light-hearted, even goofy odes to mother-child love across the animal kingdom.

  Like this one:This is the skin some babies feel

  Replete with hippo love appeal

  Each contact, cuddle, push and shove

  Elicits tons of baby love.

  And “The Elephant”:Though mother may be short on arms

  Her skin is full of warmth and charms

  And mother’s touch on baby’s skin

  Endears the heart that beats within.

  But now, after watching and tweaking relationships, he was thinking less about endearing love and more about love that must be endured. What is the other side of glowing affection, the opposite of the tender touch? There was no inclination to pen doggerel this time. The questions were darker and more dangerous, and, for a scientist, more risky. It’s one thing to study the necessity of love and touch and how to support a child. It’s another to consider what might happen if you destroy that support system. And yet, can you understand love without understanding hurt? Harry was near enough to that question, close enough to see promise and the peril. Close enough to know that another question was implicit—was he willing to risk his shiny reputation to go there, into the troubling country of love and pain?

  And yet he thought that journey mattered, maybe a lot. There were these tantalizing suggestions that even the “best families,” even the tight-knit community of the nuclear family monkeys, could not entirely depend on the kindnesses of love. Lorna Smith, Harry’s graduate student and a participant in some of the early mother love studies, was drawn into the fascination of families—how they worked, how they didn’t. Now Lorna Smith Benjamin, she holds a professorship at the University of Utah and specializes in working with dysfunctional families and helping repair the effects of traumatic childhoods.

  She remembers, as a student, just watching the rhesus families at work and play. And she also remembers an evening with Peggy Harlow and the nuclear family study: “I’ll never forget. Peggy was making a narrative of what she was looking at and what she was thinking. It was like a little suburban neighborhood with the kids out playing and the parents at home. They had lights set up that would come on in the morning and go out at night, for the day-night cycle. When the big lights went out, the room had dim backlights so that the researchers could still watch.”

  While the two women were watching, night fell over the little neighborhood. “She told me to watch one particular baby. When lab lights went off, everyone went home from the playground to snuggle up with mom and dad and go to sleep. This one little character was still out in the playground. She said, ‘He’ll go home, but not until his parents are asleep.’ After twenty minutes or so, the little thing crawled into his cage, found a patch of fur to cuddle against and went to sleep. And she said, ‘He has abusive parents.’” The little monkey, Peggy said, coped with his parents by staying away from them as much as possible. And in the dark, when his mother and father were harmless, he came home.

  The nuclear family studies were a reminder that even in the nicest neighborhoods, families don’t always work. To be fair, the studies mostly illuminated the ways that healthy families balance the tensions of multiple relationships and demands. Harry had expected that with each new baby, the mother would become dismissive of the older siblings, too busy with the little one to bother with the others. And, in fact, directly after the birth, monkey mothers did tend to push their older children away. The mother would obsess over the baby, hold it tight against her.

  At first, she would turn away from the older children. They couldn’t accept it. Wasn’t she also their mother? They would sneak up to mom and cuddle at night while she slept. They would lean against her, cooing and appealing, during the daytime for as long as she allowed it. They would woo her back. It was usually no more than a night or two before big brother and big sister were safe in the family huddle. The researchers had wondered whether the older siblings would slap the babies around, take out some of their frustrations. “Much to our surprise, the displaced infan
ts did not overtly exhibit punitive signs of jealousy toward the newcomers,” Harry wrote. “Although one male juvenile did engage in teasing his little sister at every opportunity when mother was not looking.”

  But even watching the most loving mother surrounded by her offspring, you couldn’t miss how needy and demanding and vulnerable the smallest monkeys were. They were as unnervingly fragile as their human counterparts. Peggy watched them and she worried over them. She anguished over the monkeys when they became sick, worried about the fate of one whose mother had fallen ill and died. Shortly after losing her mother, the daughter became ill, suffering from a painful intestinal bloating. “Most people think that’s due to stress,” Ruppenthal says. “Dr. Harlow came in and she kept watching over that little sick monkey and she would bring it special treats. But it died anyway. She came in the next morning and she had tears in her eyes. She said, ‘Gerry, we’ve killed her with kindness.’ They were like little kids to her. She loved them.”

  The nuclear family studies were—deservedly—gaining Peggy real respect; she was beginning to regain the professional momentum she had lost when the University of Wisconsin took her first job away. She was now conducting research in the primate lab. She had a position as lecturer in the neighboring department of educational psychology. And she was beginning to prove, scientifically, something she believed in wholeheartedly. Her experiments were directed toward the idea that the whole family matters, that mother love works best in a communal sense, that it requires the help of father and friends and even the neighborhood. “When my wife became pregnant, [Peggy] talked to me about having kids, and gave me a lot of good advice about child rearing, the importance of interacting, parenting, a stable living environment,” Ruppenthal says. “She was looking at that in the lab, sure. But her real perspective was the human perspective.”