Then, what did Harry Harlow contribution to psychology?
Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.
Likewise, what research method did Harlow use? In order to study the effects of maternal separation and social isolation, Harlow placed infant monkeys in isolated chambers. Some variations of the experiments involved placing the monkeys with surrogate mothers made of either wire or cloth to see which the young monkeys preferred.
Just so, what did Harlow discover about attachment?
Harlow experimented with rhesus monkeys, an Asian species that’s assimilates to living with humans easily. The purpose of the study was to examine their behavior in the laboratory to confirm Bowlby’s attachment theory. He separated the baby monkeys from their mothers to see how they reacted.
Can Harlow’s findings be applied to humans?
This then suggests that Harlow’s study on rhesus monkey is not valid in determining attachment as the cognitive level of humans greatly exceed that of animals and in this context, monkeys meaning that the findings Harlow found cannot be generalised to humans.