Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  And as they hunched into a corner, the rats’ stress chemistry soared. Outwardly, they were sitting as still as possible. Inwardly, everything was vibrating. Heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, adrenaline, noradrenaline, the whole stress system was ratcheting up. Even in their familiar cage, the separated rats stayed restless and unusually aggressive. In monkeys, Plotsky says, you can sometimes induce this kind of chemistry without physical separation. A little mental separation will do—the kind you get with a distracted and overbusy mother. If researchers put a mother monkey and her baby into an environment in which the mother had to forage constantly for food, worry about meals, she paid less and less attention to her infant. When these baby monkeys were tested later, as adults, they looked—in their stress responses, anyway—a lot like rats who had been separated from their mothers. They stayed always just a little frantic.

  Does this transfer to the way we treat our own children? Yes and absolutely no. If we’ve learned anything since the Watsonian psychology of the 1930s, it’s that rats are not, after all, a flawless model of human behavior. They don’t build that intense face-to-face attachment in their mother-and-child relationships. But rat work certainly raises some reasonable questions about early environment and relationships. The monkey studies raise more questions. And there is evidence, as Plotsky points out, that early experience does sensitize circuits in human brains, especially if it is a stressful experience. “Infant organisms are learning machines,” Plotsky says.

  A research team at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, led by psychiatrist Martin Teicher, has been using brain imaging technologies to compare people from a safe and protective family and those who grew up in an abusive one. In children from unhappy homes, the researchers have seen arrested development of the left hemisphere. That left side tends to be the hemisphere associated with happiness and positive emotions. The scientists have observed similar stunting in a structure called the cerebellar vermis, which is linked to emotional balance. Teicher and his colleagues suspect that the wild swings of stress hormones and neurotransmitters, responding to abuse, can subtly restructure the brain to create such differences. They also think the changes may mean that the individual is “wired” to superimpose hostility on an environment. “We know that any animal exposed to stress and neglect early in life develops a brain that is wired to experience fear, anxiety, and stress,” Teicher says. “We think the same is true of people.” He also cites the “seminal” work of Harry Harlow as a major influence on his modern, high-tech exploration of the influence of parent on child.

  A person too prone to perceive a threat may be equally prone to overreact to the perception. “You can imagine how a child with a history of physical abuse, entering preschool, might get into considerable trouble and have difficulty making stable friendships if he or she tends to see a ‘threat’ where none exists,” Plotsky says. The researchers who study the effects of early damaging environment on children, almost to a person, want to find ways to turn that around. As they better understand the biological damage done by abuse and neglect, they wonder whether that hard-won knowledge can be used to help those children. Can we undo what is harmful to us in childhood? Can we preserve what is best?

  Recently, Meaney again focused on rats with indifferent mothers, females who weren’t particularly interested in licking and grooming. By now, you’d predict that these rat pups were doomed to corrosive high-stress chemistry. You could also envision them as those neurotic adult rats, hustling aimlessly around their cages. Meaney tried two kinds of therapies. As Steve Suomi had, he gave the baby rats better mothers. Again, he found that an anxious baby rat given to a nurturing mother will change for the better, become less stressed and happier. In this newer study, though, Meaney was also interested in trying to help animals that don’t have a chance for a better parent. So he put other stressed infants into an enriched environment. Several times a day, he took the baby rats out of their plain home cages and placed them in larger pens equipped with ropes for climbing, running wheels, wood blocks, and other rodent entertainment. This was Gig Levine’s idea of “handling” taken to a newly sophisticated level. It worked, too. In response to that engaging playground, as the rats looked about with interest, their stress levels came down—and stayed lower. The rats—compared to those from similarly neglectful homes—were noticeably easygoing as they grew up.

  There was a curious catch, though. The enriched playground wasn’t nearly as effective at fixing the problem as having a better mother. When Meaney studied the brains of these newly calmed rats, he found their internal stress response was still set on a high anxiety level. The psychologists tracking those rats now suspect that they didn’t actually correct the stress problems. What the enrichment program did was strengthen other parts of the brain, enough that the rats could compensate. In effect, the rest of the brain was able to stabilize the system. Paul Plotsky thinks of this as not so much a fix as a bandage. “When you improve the rats’ behavior, are you correcting the initial problems or are you creating a patch?” Plotsky asks. “The answer seems to be, at least in some cases, you are creating a patch.”

  And perhaps, sometimes, the patch is the best we’re going to achieve. So far we haven’t figured out a way to rescue all children soon enough, to stop child abuse, to guarantee every baby a loving home. So far, there’s no guarantee that we will. So perhaps we should put the energy into making some damn good patches for damaged children.

  A few people have put the patch idea into direct practice. One is a neuroscientist, Bruce Perry, the outspoken chief of child psychiatry, at Houston’s Baylor University. Perry argues that our biology is designed for a more complex social world than even a good nuclear family may provide. “Our current living systems are disrespectful of the brain’s potential,” he says. “It’s unfair to expect one or two parents to provide all of the rich opportunity that our brain is seeking.”

  Perry has also tried enrichment approaches, touch therapy, dance, art, storytelling, and drama. By doing brain imaging, he’s been able to see that such activities can help strengthen specific parts of the brain; for example, storytelling can build up the outer cortex, and play therapy can stimulate the limbic system, at the base of the brain. The children who benefit the most from this, he says, are neglected children. They haven’t had anyone to play with them, stimulate them, and teach them how to interact with others. “You smile at your mother. She doesn’t smile back. You want to be hugged. She’s busy; she pushes you away. You ask a question and she doesn’t look at you when she answers. And so you’re taught that smiling gets you nothing, that people don’t want to look at you, that you are unwanted,” Perry says, and there is both sympathy and frustration in his voice.

  Studies of neglected children find that often what they see is a still-face, no matter what the expression. When shown photographs of facial expressions, abused children often mistakenly see anger. Neglected children, too, often see nothing. Many of them lack the basic face reading skills, period. Happy, sad, furious? They just weren’t sure what a face might be telling them. Of course, this makes complete sense. Who would teach them to read a face? The mother who had no interest in them? The father who wasn’t there? No one had been there to teach them how to interact with another person. Once again, it was back to cloth mom and her empty heart and empty head.

  This was what Harry saw as the ultimate failure of cloth moms; socially, he said, “they have an effective IQ of zero.” The stuffed surrogate could offer her children a warm body—but teach them nothing about a living one. The final tally of Harry Harlow’s studies, and those that grew out of them, gives us “a body of knowledge about the devastating effects of social isolation and their extreme resistance to treatment. Many people still do not appreciate how bad the effects are,” says psychologist Irwin Bernstein. Sometimes it seems that this is the hole in the dike, the chink in the armor, of our very successful species—our need not just to be loved, but to feel loved,
when no one is guaranteed either.

  A parent might not respond to a child for many reasons: depression, stress, weariness, drugs, alcohol, indifference. If a parent turns away consistently, Ed Tronick suspects that the child begins to see herself as ineffective and helpless. Perhaps it’s worth repeating that we all—child and adult—need at least one relationship we can lean on without worrying about falling. And by definition, this means that both people in the relationship must do their part—asking for what they want, answering, talking, listening, reaching out, and reaching back. One leans when she is weary, one supports when he is strong. The still-face experiment is all about the baby’s seeking the adult’s response: Smile back at me, talk back to me, touch me when I reach for you. That means it’s also all about the adult’s paying attention. “The infants’ message is that their mothers should change what they are doing,” Tronick says. And the point—at least for the infant—is that if you are paying attention, you are indeed going to catch her when she unexpectedly falls.

  What’s important is not that the mother gets it right every time. No mother studied by any psychologist responded perfectly to her child in every instance. No psychologist who studies mothers thinks that perfection has anything to do with good mothering. It’s fixing mistakes that matters—even just the willingness to try again. Tronick found that when infants are confronted by a mismatch—I asked you for this, you gave me that—the babies usually just signal again. And he has analyzed what happens next. Thirty-four percent of mothers in his study recognized the baby’s need next time round. Another 36 percent nailed it on the third try. “Infants and their mothers are constantly moving into mismatch states and then successfully repairing them,” says Tronick. He thinks of this as interactive error and interactive repair. The mother plays peek-a-boo until the baby is overexcited. He looks away, he stops smiling—it’s a message. Stop. I need a break. The responsive mother breaks off the game, lets the baby cool down, corrects the mistake, and returns gently to the game or goes on to something else.

  If one returns to the idea of the right parent, it may simply be a mother or father who doesn’t give up on the child. No one gets an infallible parent. No one gets a perfectly secure base every minute of every day. We have built-in buffers for that, all those self-comforting actions that everyone needs occasionally. There is no requirement for angelic perfection in parenting. The requirement is just to stay in there. Harry’s research tells us that love is work. So do all the studies that follow. The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give. Be a mother who listens, a father who cuddles, a friend who calls back, a helping neighbor, a loving child.

  That emphasis on love in our everyday lives may be the best of that quiet revolution in psychology, the one that changed the way we think about love and relationship almost without our noticing that had happened. We take for granted now that parents should hug their children, that relationships are worth the time, that taking care of each other is part of the good life. It is such a good foundation that it’s almost astonishing to consider how recent it is. For that foundation under our feet we owe a debt to Harry Harlow and to all the scientists who believed and worked toward a psychology of the heart.

  At the end, in Harry’s handiwork, there’s nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it’s a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships. Or, as Harry Harlow wrote to a friend, “Perhaps one should always be modest when talking about love.”

  EPILOGUE

  Extreme Love

  For better or for worse, our self-perception is never animal free.... There is no escape: human behavior is always placed in this larger context of other behaving organisms.

  Frans de Waal,

  The Ape and the Sushi Master, 2001

  “IF YOU’RE GOING TO WORK WITH LOVE, you are going to have to work with all its aspects,” Harry Harlow once said. No one could have meant that more sincerely. Harry was unflinching in pursuit of love in all its incarnations. His research led from the best of mother love to the worst. He looked at families made joyfully close and families shredded apart. He measured kindness. He measured hopelessness. He charted life surrounded by affection and life stripped of all relationships. He explored emotional damage and he insisted on exploring emotional healing, as well. Harry described the arc of those studies as: love created, love destroyed, love regained. No American researcher before or since has sent young primates through such a range of love’s terrain, from transcendent to treacherous.

  If he had only explored love at its best, the golden nature of touch, say, a discussion of the moral and ethical issues raised by Harry Harlow’s work might not be necessary. But in the same way that his results helped transform our understanding of love, his open-ended inquiries helped transform our sense of ethical and moral limits in such research. Can you imagine choosing to do his experiments on total isolation, to induce such grief in a baby monkey that he literally dies in your care? To design and build a monster mother that flings a clinging baby across a cage? Yes, those were extremes, even in Harry’s lab. But should research go to extremes? One of the questions that now underlies Harry’s work is this: What are we willing to pay for knowledge? How far into the ethically risky realms of research should we go in pursuit of a promising idea, a compelling question?

  Harry Harlow never denied that animals suffered in his laboratory. He was equally forthright about why he could live with that. “Remember, for every mistreated monkey there exist a million mistreated children,” Harry said. “If my work will point this out and save only one million human children, I really can’t get overly concerned about ten monkeys.”

  But other people can get concerned. Other people can mind a lot about those ten lost monkeys. Many among the animal rights movement still mind; they remember Harry Harlow all too well. His name doesn’t speak to them of love or friendship or the absolute imperative of relationships. They remember him as the man who tortured small and helpless animals. They want the rest of us to remember him that way, too.

  Harry Harlow’s legacy can seem paradoxical, bright and shadowed at once. His work helped change psychology for the better. We now take for granted the idea of holding our children when they are frightened, of treating them with affection. We accept that standing by matters. Being ready to comfort or listen or laugh—being willing to give as well as to receive—is fundamental in a relationship. We believe that, too. But our acceptance represents a revolution of sorts in the study of relationships. Both as a society, and as individuals, we now believe that our watch counts, that how we treat others shapes them and also shapes us.

  Even the darkest of the Wisconsin studies—the motherless monkey work, the evil-mother studies—spoke to that recognition of one person’s influence over another. Harry’s studies are now woven into the treatment of child abuse. They played a role in illuminating the strength of the connection between a child and a dangerous parent. They made real the long-term effects of what was once considered a brief period in a child’s life. The controlled studies that he conducted could never have been done in children. Early in the twentieth century, the National Institutes of Health did receive a proposal to isolate children for up to two years. It was, naturally, rejected. “Since that time, nonhumane experiments have told us what results this inhuman experiment would have produced,” Harry wrote in an introduction to a 1971 psychology textbook. His experiments are still used to counter criticisms that human data—continuing studies of children in orphanages—are just circumstantial. Attachment researchers say they still sometimes rely on the cloth-mother work to answer those who say that a parent’s touch doesn’t matter. “I think Harry would be surpr
ised to realize how important he is in clinical treatment,” says his old friend William Verplanck.

  And yet, Harry’s work also casts an ethical cloud over the research itself. It is hard to dismiss the image of a baby monkey who desperately clings to his mechanical mother while she shakes him until his bones rattle. It’s hard to think of the infant who calls and calls for a mother who will never come back. There are photos from Harry’s lab of monkeys who have been released from long-term isolation. The images make you think that, melodramatic or not, the name is apt. The animals look like survivors of a concentration camp: eyes blind with horror, arms still wrapped around themselves. Is it hard to look past those haunted faces? Some would say impossible.

  Harry’s darkest work can seem so very dark that even some of his fellow psychologists stand deliberately back from it. Some worry about being associated with such politically difficult studies. Some are troubled by the ethical implications. There are those who could wish away the sorrow and loss unmistakable in even the black-and-white images of Harry’s work. If you had never heard of Harry Harlow before you opened this book, if you wonder how a psychologist who did so much pioneering work can seem so invisible only twenty years after his death, that transparency is due partly to the unease he yet stirs in his own profession. “There’s no doubt that he’s been considered politically incorrect,” says psychologist Duane Rumbaugh, Harry’s friendly competitor in the science of primate intelligence. “It was surprising to me how fast the citations dropped off after his death.”