Monkeys and Harlow

First off, Harlow was pretty interesting. He was emotionally unstable, experiencing bouts of depression and a lack of identity, possibly due to his distant relationship with his mother. And it turns out his most famous experiment happened because he fell out of love with his wife Clara. Interesting. But his experiments, more specifically the cloth mommy thing, were landmarks in the psychology field. He set up a wire monkey that provided nourishment and a cloth monkey that was just cute and soft. The monkey was okay when the wire monkey was taken away, but when the cloth monkey was taken away, the baby had a spaz attack. It was even shown that the baby monkey felt just as strongly about the cloth monkey as its real mother. The only problem was that the monkeys who were mothered by the cloth monkeys were extremely antisocial. Oops. And it didn't help that his next wife Peggy was violently ill with cancer. This guy can't win. The he created the "rape rack"-- ew-- and got some monkeys pregnant. Not himself. And then his wife died, and he won an award, but he was obviously very upset. That's basically it.