by Deborah Blum
TEN
Love Lessons
Love, and the lack of it, changes the young brain forever.
Thomas Lewis,
Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon,
A General Theory of Love, 2000
AMOTHER’S FACE IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL. Harry Harlow came to believe that, years ago. He couldn’t design a mother’s face that would turn a baby away, not even cloth mom with her red stare and her flat green smile. In the look of her mother, the infant saw the gorgeous appearance of security, the commitment of just being there. No scientist has ever found an object in the universe that a baby would rather see than a mother’s smiling face. Perhaps there’s a carryover effect; beyond mom, babies love to look at faces, period. Since Harry’s first mother-baby work, since Bowlby’s theory was accepted, since The Competent Infant and the scores of other books exploring child development, psychologists had come to marvel at how passionate babies were about nature’s assembly of eyes, nose, and mouth.
Scientists can, and do, show these very small humans pictures of trucks, trees, animals, flowers, people from head to foot—and infants will look at them all. They’re interested. They’ll study the scene, the colors and patterns. Then they’ll turn back to gaze at a pictured face all over again. Curve of lips, arch of brow, narrowing of eyes—there are countless meanings in this human canvas. A baby will peer intently and try to decipher those flickering expressions. In systematic tests where infants are shown pictures of people with varying expressions, researchers find direct evidence that the infants deftly interpret facial meaning. The babies prefer joyful faces to angry ones. And they respond. Very young humans stare happily at a beaming smile, look somberly back at a frown.
Babies scan faces, it seems, for answers to their most important questions: Am I doing the right thing? Am I making you happy? Are you paying attention to me? Am I safe? Am I loved enough to matter? In one classic experiment, called the “visual cliff test,” researchers put infants on a raised platform, a clear panel set in the middle. A baby crawling along the platform, looking down, would suddenly see a drop to the floor through the thick Plexiglas. The panel was as sturdy as the rest of the platform; but they didn’t know that. Children would tremble there, fingers still gripping the opaque boards of the platform, staring down that steep virtual cliff.
The children in this study were ten months old. They would reach the drop-off, hesitate, look down. Then they would turn their heads and look back at their mothers. The small sons and daughters would hold the edge while they studied their mothers’ faces. If the mothers smiled and nodded, if their faces looked calm and encouraging, most of the babies went on over. A little tentatively maybe, their hands carefully feeling the slick surface of the Plexiglas. Sometimes the researchers told the mothers to wear a difference face. If the women looked fearful or doubtful, the infants’ expressions began to mirror that. Their foreheads would wrinkle in apprehension. And then the babies would slowly back away from that perceived perilous edge. In psychology, the cliff experiment is justly famous. It stands as a stunning example of how much children look to their parents for answers—and receive them—without a word spoken.
The test is also a rare example of faith in another person. How many people in our lives trust us so much that if we nod and smile, they will chance a tumble down a cliff? So there’s another point, here, about the specialized competence of infants. At this moment in their lives they give absolute trust. The same child, ten years later, relies on his own judgment, filtering a parent’s assurances through experience. A brand new baby, who does not yet have such internal judgment, must rely on others. And since gathering facial information is imperative, babies must become adept at reading the subtle signals in a change of expression. They can use a mother’s response to calm their own fears—or to validate them. They are like tiny treasure hunters, carefully searching the facial maps around them.
“Clearly, the emotional state of others is of fundamental importance to the infant’s emotional state,” says Harvard child psychiatrist Edward Tronick. His choice of the word others rather than mothers is deliberate. Children form many important relationships with adults. A “mother” may be biological, adoptive, guardian, foster, grandparent, relative, friend. In recognizing the full range of emotional connection and intimacy, our society has begun to embrace a closer role for fathers as well. In 1994, poet and science writer Diane Ackerman wrote that, compared to a mother’s love, “a father’s love ... is more distanced, and often has conditions attached to it.” Now, almost a decade later, our culture seeks to bring the father into that emotionally tight inner circle of the family. Infants may also scan a dad’s face for comfort and for the kind of unconditional love that used to be seen as a mother’s specialty. Of course, as Harry Harlow pointed out, the majority of infants in our world still have high hopes that mother will be there, smiling or frowning, when a potential cliff looms in view.
Babies send their parents nonverbal messages, too. Adults, though, aren’t as adept at reading them. Some are easy enough. Infants smile when they are pleased; cling when they need contact; follow with their eyes when they are worried that we may leave. They cry when they want help or comfort—although exactly what they want can be tricky to figure out. If small children aren’t reassured, if no one responds, they comfort themselves. In another study, psychologists placed a bright toy near a baby but just out of her reach. The infants in this study were tested individually—but they mirrored each other’s behaviors anyway. The babies were too young to crawl to the ball. They tried, though. The scientists watched as the babies struggled to reach the bright ball, stretching out hands and failing, stretching and failing again.
In frustration, the infants sobbed to themselves. If help still failed to arrive, they would try to calm themselves down. They would suck their thumbs or look deliberately away from the toy. Thumb sucking turns out to be one of those natural resources, an effective way for babies to comfort themselves. Infants also calm themselves by the simple act of looking away. If a parent frustrates, if a toy rolls away and can’t be reached, a simple way to cope is to focus on something else. It’s a lesson learned in the first months of our lives that holds up well for the rest of our lives.
And that’s exactly what babies do. An observant parent can see the child’s eyes flick away—to a blanket, a wall, into the air even, but away from the source of unhappiness. If we—as parents—are paying attention, we may recognize this gaze-away as a message to us. The baby needs downtime. Even the smallest humans, the most dependent and connected, sometimes need resting space—the infant equivalent of Zen meditation or a walk alone in a quiet woodland.
What we parents won’t see, of course, is the simple, lovely biology that runs stream-like through a baby’s response to tranquility. Scientists have been able to track that internal shift in the most straightforward way. When a tired or frustrated baby looks away, her heart rate steadies and drops. If researchers have put a few sensors in place, they can see that change in the green line that indicates heartbeat. It’s like watching water change at the sea front, from choppy little waves to smooth shiny swells. Thus the machinery of medicine can track the way the heart begins to ease.
Back in 1983, Ed Tronick at Harvard had begun to consider the power of this interaction between parent and child. It occurred to him that the I-smile-you-smile-back kind of relationship could be the basis of an interesting experiment. It wasn’t the physical smile that interested him so much. It was what it represented—the give and give back between mother and child. When a toy is unreachable, an adult is instructed to respond in that experiment to the baby’s signaling for help. The lab assistant will always eventually move the toy into those fat little hands. But what if nothing the baby did elicited a response? What if the toy was left to hover out of reach? What if he crawled to the edge of that cliff, turned, and got nothing from his mother—no gleam of encouragement, no sudden look of alarm? What if an infant could coo and call and coax and find that he h
as nothing in his box of social skills that will get him an answer?
It was in those questions that Tronick thought he saw a way to tug at the mother-child bond, the tie that Harry Harlow had considered so unbreakable. Tronick came up with what he called the Face-to-Face Still-Face Paradigm. He and a colleague, Jeffrey Cohn, asked the mothers of three-month-olds simply to go blank for a few minutes while looking at their children. The “still face” test demanded only that—a total lack of response. The mother had to present a face frozen into neutrality. No anger or threat. No humor or love. The all-important facial map would show nothing but emotionally empty terrain.
“The effect on the infant is dramatic,” Tronick wrote in an early publication, echoing his own initial astonishment at the power of that still face. “Infants almost immediately detect the change and attempt to solicit the mother’s attention.” When a mother still refused to respond, babies tried self-comfort. They sucked their thumbs. They looked away. Then the babies tried again, just to see a little response. They’d reach for their best tools to engage their mothers. Infants would smile, gurgle, and reach. And, as ordered, the mothers would return nothing. The babies would comfort themselves again. Then they would try again. And again. Babies know this matters. They’re stubborn about it. But after a while, confronted with only that blank face, each child stopped trying.
“I remember when I first did the still-face paradigm,” says Tronick, who today heads the pediatric research division at Harvard Medical School. He is a tall, elegant man with silvery hair, brilliant blue eyes, and a habit of saying very precisely what he thinks. “I have a sequence of infant photographs from the first study. Pictures of a three-month-old reacting to a mother holding a still face. First, the baby is solicitous, trying to appeal to the mother, then he starts sucking his thumb, and then he just collapses, curls up in a corner.
“I said to people, look, it’s like Spitz’s babies; it’s like the monkeys in Harlow’s study. Look at this emotional reaction.” With that perspective, Tronick suddenly found himself at the receiving end of yet another of those Spitz-Bowlby-Harlow reactions. The psychologists he showed the pictures to thought that what they saw couldn’t represent emotion. It seemed to Tronick that his colleagues were almost personally uncomfortable with the idea that the connection between mother and child could be so strong. The notion that relationships could matter that much was unnerving. “And people just didn’t want to see it that way. It’s too close. I think part of the reason that rejection occurs is that there’s a denial going on. People don’t want to believe that a child could be so hurt—or that we could be so hurtful.”
And that—the willingness to explore the worst of our nature as well as the best—is one of the things that Tronick came to admire in Harry Harlow. Here was a psychologist who never pretended, who was willing to look at even the uncomfortable result. If he thought it was right, he would fight for it. People used to argue to Harry that his lonely baby monkeys just needed more cognitive input, a richer environment, Tronick remembers. Psychologists would insist that the dysfunctional behavior of baby rhesus with cloth mom couldn’t possibly have anything to do with emotional needs. “And Harry just refused to back down from his own interpretation, that it was social connection, that it was input from the mother that made the difference. Harry, even when he was doing extreme experiments, always saw the normal side, and that was connection. He was never confused about what mattered.”
During his fifty years in psychology, Harry Harlow explored many research interests. His was never a one-track mind. He had an infinite capacity for curiosity, a compulsive need always to go himself one better. What didn’t fascinate him? Harry was interested in the structure of the brain, the biochemistry of behavior, play, mental abilities, and sex differences. But mostly he brought all this together in an exploration of the whole tangled messy business of relationships. If you line up his major works—learning abilities, curiosity, baby care, mother love, touch, social networks, loneliness, stress, abuse, depression—they all fit together into pieces of a living puzzle. Harry believed, entirely, in the power and importance of relationships; and if one is to trace his impact on his field, one should not look at one study, one thought, but at the way the studies and thoughts fit together. In the end, Harry Harlow’s vision of the nature of love was a sweeping one. His studies still stand, like bedrock, for psychologists who believe that love matters, that social connection counts, that we are defined as individuals, in part, by our place in the community.
“Relationships with a capital R,” says Sally Mendoza, chair of the psychology department at the University of California-Davis. Mendoza did her graduate work under Gig Levine, during his time at Stanford. She is a calm, friendly woman with a brilliant smile, an infectious laugh, and a razor-sharp mind. Unlike Tronick, she is not a Harlow fan. Mendoza came of age in the rising feminism of the 1970s and finds it hard to like Harry’s sarcastic and sometimes misogynistic style. But, even so, she has long believed that the way we connect is absolutely, fundamentally important in understanding ourselves—and any social species.
Even in graduate school, Mendoza was fascinated by relationships. Her idea was that we rarely act in isolation. Social connections influence many of our behaviors, underlie our decisions. Consider an observable behavior—from goofing with a friend to grieving over a lost lover. Mendoza was sure that each interaction was more than visible externally. It also changed internal physiology and chemistry. Behind her idea lies a provocative theory: that our individual body chemistry is not so individual at all; that each of us is designed, in part, just to respond to the other people in our lives.
If so, then the lyric insistence of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne that “no man is an island” takes on a scientific literalness. We become inseparable from the fine fragile fabric of our relationships. “People told me I was crazy,” Mendoza says. “I’d present this in an audience with people like Frank Beach [a pioneer in the study of hormones and behavior] and everyone would go after me, asking ‘What’s the mechanism? Are you saying that just relationships can have an independent effect?’
I’d say, ‘Yes.’
They’d say, ‘How?’
I’d say, ‘I don’t know’ and they’d say, ‘You’re crazy.’
“But Harlow and Bowlby did have a big impact on thinking about relationships,” Mendoza adds. Gradually, the field also recognized that her heretical notions might actually have some credibility. The power of those first cloth mother studies was inescapable, she believes. Who could deny the image of a baby monkey holding as if to a lifeline onto that artificially warmed terrycloth body? There’s another study, out of the Harlow lab, that speaks even more to her. It’s the Butler box in its “love machine” days. Mendoza could not set aside the image of the little monkey locked inside Butler’s box, tirelessly opening a window for a glimpse of his mother. “And that’s why I started reading Harlow. He completely strips away everything. Harlow’s work tells you that without social support, you are in real trouble. You can end up in pathological personality development.”
Our bodies know this; our brains recognize it subconsciously, even if we cannot accept it intellectually. Or so Mendoza suggests. We spend many of our limited waking minutes on each other. Even office life thrives on gossip and jokes and friendships. Parents with demanding jobs still huddle over homework with their children, cheer them at soccer games, fall asleep reading to them at night. Adult children still telephone their parents long after they no longer “need” them. We lunch, we date, we party, we spend quiet evenings at home; often the very best minutes of our days are the connected ones. And Mendoza believes that our particular biological nature demands this. If you think of the nature of love as a multifaceted gem of an idea, then our need to belong is a major facet. Without even thinking about it, “we spend a huge amount of time in relationships,” she says. “That should tell us that it’s inordinately important, that relationships are critical to biology.”
; No one tells Mendoza she’s crazy these days. She works in the hot new psychology specialty called the biology of emotions. At the California Regional Primate Research Center, another of the NIH facilities created by Harry Harlow and his colleagues, Mendoza and Bill Mason, among others, have been trying to better define the brain anatomy and neurochemistry that helps sustain those bonds. Mendoza has looked at the intricate squirrel monkey society as an example. She finds that even peripheral relationships matter to these small, tightly networked animals. If Mendoza takes a squirrel monkey out of his group, she can measure a sudden spike in the animal’s stress hormones. The rise isn’t only in the separated individual. The hormone blazes across the group, even in monkeys who rarely spent time with the missing animal. Everyone registers that someone is missing. She suspects that we humans respond similarly to minor relationship changes—a coworker’s leaving, a neighbor’s moving on. It’s a reminder that we weave our social fabric from many, many threads. There’s a reassuring aspect to living in that complex of relationships. If one fails us, there are still others to keep the net stretched beneath us.
“One person may go to a single relationship for everything they need. I rely on a rich network of friends,” Mendoza says. “And I firmly believe that you can make up for a nuclear family more easily than you can make up for friendships. Harlow saw that in monkey communities. The friendship, the peer relationships, the kin networks.” There are different ways of describing Harry’s idea that we need many “affectional systems” in our lives—friendships, as Mendoza says, community as Tronick says—the more the merrier, it takes a village, no man is an island. And Mendoza may be right; certainly Harry would have thought so, that one’s nuclear family need not be the only—or even the best—family in our lives. We can and do extend our family circle with friendship and sometimes it’s the extended part that matters the most.