The Nature of Love

The Nature of Love

For the day that’s in it, Futureproof looks at the science behind love

(This piece was first published on www.newstalk.ie on 13th Feb 2013)

What is love? Haddaway famously once asked in 1993. It was, judging by the rest of the lyrics, a rhetorical question, but seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, it might be appropriate to revisit the matter. Because the answer is a lot more complicated than it may first seem. Take for example the love between the mother and a child. We all know that to feel loved, children need physical contact and affection, but the story of how we know that is a fascinating one. It concerns some baby monkeys, and some incredibly cruel experiments by a man named Harry Harlow.

In the first half of the twentieth century, attitudes towards the parenting of young children were radically different to modern thinking, to say the least. The common belief among psychologists and parenting experts was that too much affection from parents spoiled the child. Mothers who hugged and kiss their children too much were warned that their son or daughter would grow up needy, dependent and generally ill-equipped for the harsh realities of the world. This was after all, a generation half-reared by the U.S. military, whose idols were Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne.

Author of Love at Goon Park Deborah Blum paints a sad picture:

But by the late 40s, there was growing evidence that this approach to parenting could have catastrophic effects.  Orphanages, hospitals and other institutions recorded a spike in developmental problems where affection was withdrawn. Worse still, mortality rates began to rise too.

But in the 1950s, an American psychologist by the name of Harry Harlow set about investigating the very nature of love between a mother and her child. His experiments may have changed the parent-child relationship of the 20th century.

Harlow himself was a complex character:

As a behaviourist, Harlow had bred a colony of Rhesus Macaque monkeys to observe how they learn and interact with each other. Quite early on, he began to notice that infants abandoned by their mother did not grow up to be normally functioning adults often not just negligent but also abusive as parents themselves.

This gave Harlow the idea for his experiment The Nature of Love. He placed newborn monkeys in a nurseries from birth, accompanied by two surrogate mechanical mothers. One was made of chicken wire, the other of soft terry cloth.  Both mothers were designed to provide milk to nurse the infants and were warmed by an electric lamp.  He then recorded the interactions between the monkeys and the two dolls.

Harlow’s first observation was that the baby monkeys almost ten times as much time hugging and clinging to the cloth mothers than their wire counterparts. Surprisingly, even when the milk from the cloth mother was turned off and the heat lamp removed, the monkeys still returned to the cloth mothers for comfort and security after they fed.

In his second experiment, he separated the monkeys into two groups: one group was assigned the wire mother and the other, the terry cloth surrogate. Although both groups physically grew at the same rate and drank equal amounts of milk, the difference in their behaviour was startling. The group mothered by the cold, hard wire doll were nervous, skittish and when their ‘mother’ was removed from the cage, they would scream, cry or freeze up and rock themselves back and forth.

Deborah Blum explains:

The other group, comforted by the cloth mother, showed more independence. They would explore their environment more freely and would react with relative calm when the cloth mother was taken away.  In a nutshell, they were happier, more confident and more secure.  Was that because they ‘loved’ their cloth mother? Harlow would answer with another question:

Over a decade, Harlow separated newborn monkeys from their mothers at varying intervals of their development to observe their behaviour, and determined that after 90 days of separation, the mental trauma caused was irreversible.  Harlow maintains that these experiments show that our happiness depends not just on necessities like warmth or food, but that we require affection and security too.  That a mother’s love and embrace were in fact, nothing less than a basic human need.

To hear Deborah Blum tell the full story of Harry Harlow on Futureproof click on the link below:

You can also see Harlow’s experiments here:

For more stories like this, tune in to Futureproof on Newstalk 106-108fm, Saturdays at 6pm.