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

Harlows Observations in The Nature of hump - Research Paper ExampleThe conclusion is that the baby, human or monkey if it is to survive, must clutch at more than a straw (ibid). It has proved that contact comfort might be a really important variable in the development of the infants affection for the mother (ibid). The experiments results lead us to the conclusion that With duration 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 in condition(p) to hunger-thirst reduction (ibid, p. 676). The nursing variable, Harlows team found that is no way an unimportant variable as contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable, but we did not impart it to overshadow so completely the variable of nursing (ibid). Harlow was primarily an experimental and comparative psychologist. Still, he has make substantial contributions to many areas of psychology such as cognition, behaviouralism, child development, animal intelligence, psychopathology treatment and so on. Harlows 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. Harlows experiments became instrumental in going beyond many of the assumptions of humanistic psychology, peculiarly the hierarchy of needs paradigm developed by Abraham Maslov. Moreover, it rejected the deterministic aspects of behavioral analysis too. The term was path-breaking as it challenged not only some of the key assumptions of the existing psychology but also flat the key concepts and keywords commonly used in psychological inquiries. His replacement of the word attachm ent with love as a keyword in psychology had a profound influence.