Love - Complex Human Emotion

Love is perhaps one of the most complex human emotions, and one that has been widely discussed among philosophers, writers, and scientists alike. While some people believe that love is not something that can be defined in terms of science, psychologists argue that it is far too interesting to be ignored. Harry Harlow is considered one of the psychologists who made the greatest contribution to the study of love and affection. Harlow’s experiments were designed to test whether love and affection were basic human needs, similar to our primal needs like the desire for food and water. He was able to test this using rhesus monkeys, believing that their reactions to love and affection would be very similar to those of a human. The key aspect of Harlow’s experiment was the two different surrogate mothers that Harlow constructed for the infant monkeys that he was testing. Both mothers were constructed so that they could provide the basic needs for the infant monkeys such as food and warmth. The difference between the two mothers was that one was made of smooth wood which was covered with soft cloth while the other was made of wire mesh. Harlow designed the monkeys to be identical in every way except for their ability to offer what he called “contact comfort”. He then set up eight different cages; each cage had an infant monkey and one of each surrogate mom. In half of the cages the wire mom provided the food and the warmth, and in the other half the cloth mom was the provider. Harlow was attempting to see if the attachment the infant monkeys developed towards their mothers was due to the fact that she provided them with their basic needs or the fact that she provided them with affection. Many psychologists at this time firmly believed that any attachment that developed was based purely on the fact that the mothers