Wellness Calendar: Sunday 6 April

Harlow’s monkeys

In 1958, Harry Harlow undertook experiments on baby monkeys, who were taken away from their mothers at a very early age. He replaced the mothers with mock-ups made of wire and wood. He gave each baby monkey a choice between a surrogate mother dressed in cloth and a bare-wire mother with a bottle of milk.

The baby monkeys chose the warmth and intimacy of the clothed surrogate mother, over and above the milk. This revelation directly challenged Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy-of-needs model, as it placed a greater value on the need for love rather than the need for food. And by love we mean the full array of love: the tenderness, the warmth, the care, the concern, the kindness, the bond and the attachment.

So, if love is one of the most important aspects of a primate’s life, what happens when we don’t get it, or we don’t get enough of it, or we don’t ask for it – for fear of being rejected or humiliated?

What personal lesson(s) might you take from these findings?

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