PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
Bowlby’s writings made a real impact – changing the rules in hospitals
so that mothers could stay with their children – but they also attracted
criticism. Scientifically-minded sceptics pointed out that the emotional
problems of the children he studied could have been caused by a
range of factors, not necessarily deprivation of maternal love and care.
However, his central claim that the quality of an infant’s relationship
with its mother has life-long consequences for psychological adjustment
has been confirmed by countless studies.
Textbooks often focus exclusively on
Harlow’s early research – the triumph of
touch over food. Experts like Bowlby also
tended to pay selective attention to these
findings. But the reality is that Harlow’s
work took many unpredictable turns.
Later studies showed that baby macaques
deprived of maternal love grew up rather
well-adjusted if they’d had the benefit of
contact with peers, yet the opposite wasn’t
true. To have maternal contact but be
deprived of the company of peers led to
persistent social problems. Another curious
finding was that the orphaned macaques who abused their first-borns
tended to be loving mothers to their later offspring. We often want our
scientific findings to be neat and easily interpretable, but Harlow’s work
illustrates how messy psychological outcomes can be.
MEASURING ATTACHMENT
In the late 1970s a colleague of Bowlby’s, Mary Ainsworth, devised a test
for identifying the attachment style of a child to her principal caregiver,
versions of which are still in widespread use today. Known as the
strange-situation test, the procedure involves observing what happens
when a young child is separated from their parent and confronted by a
stranger. A toddler who’s distressed when their mother leaves but who is
quickly comforted on her return is said to be “securely attached”, while
those who pay little attention and quickly move away from her when
she returns are “insecurely attached”. A study from the early 1990s by
Gottfried Spangler and Klaus Grossmann used physiological measures,
and found that even though these insecurely-attached children appeared
unemotional on the outside, inside their hearts were beating away in
“Certainly, man
cannot live by milk
alone. Love is an
emotion that does not
need to be bottle- or
spoon-fed, and we
may be sure that
there is nothing to be
gained by giving lip
service to love.”
Harry Harlow (1958)