Harlow's Observations in The Nature of Love Research Paper - 1

Harlow's Observations in The Nature of Love - Research Paper Example The conclusion is that â€Å"the baby, human or monkey if it is to survive, must clutch at more than a straw† (ibid). It has proved that â€Å"contact comfort might be a very important variable in the development of the infant's affection for the mother† (ibid). The experiments results lead us to the conclusion that â€Å"With age and opportunity to learn, subjects with the lactating wire mother showed decreasing responsiveness to her and increasing responsiveness to the nonlactating cloth mother, a finding completely contrary to any interpretation of derived drive in which the mother form becomes conditioned to hunger-thirst reduction† (ibid, p. 676). The nursing variable, Harlow’s team found that is no way an unimportant variable as â€Å"contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable, but we did not expect it to overshadow so completely the variable of nursing† (ibid). Harlow was primarily an experimental and comparative psychologist. Still, he has made substantial contributions to many areas of psychology such as cognition, behaviouralism, child development, animal intelligence, psychopathology treatment and so on. Harlow’s experiments on monkeys and social development fostered the cognitive revolution in the 1960s and took psychology away from the simplistic behaviorist explanations. The time period was dominated by behavioralism and psychoanalysis and both had many a priori assumptions on human attachment. Harlow’s experiments became instrumental in going beyond many of the assumptions of humanistic psychology, especially the hierarchy of needs paradigm developed by Abraham Maslov. Moreover, it rejected the deterministic aspects of behavioral analysis too. The article was path-breaking as it challenged not only some of the key assumptions of the existing psychology but also even the key concepts and keywords commonly used in psychological inquiries. His replacement of the word attachment with love as a keyword in psychology had a profound influence.