Tag Archives: Harlow

Interview with Marga Vicedo on The Nature and Nurture of Love

Books, General, Interview, , , , , , , , ,

AHP is pleased to present an interview with historian of science Marga Vicedo on her recent book The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America. The full interview follows below. Many thanks to Marga for agreeing to be interviewed!

AHP: As a historian and philosopher of biology how did you first become interested in the various ways we’ve conceptualized human instincts and the nature of love?

I have always been interested in understanding our views on human nature because those views inform our ideas about how to lead a moral life. How should I act? What should I do in order to be a good person and have a life worth living? Those seem to me the most fundamental questions we all confront in our lives. The more we understand who we are, the better we will be able to answer those questions. Thus, very early in my philosophical and historical studies I wanted to explore what biology and psychology have to say about human nature.

A central debate in those fields focuses on how much and in what ways our biological constitution influences our mental and emotional makeup. Scientists have used different concepts over time: instincts, innate drives, evolutionary stable strategies, human nature, genetic makeup, … but the question is basically the same: how much does biology shape the way we think, feel, and act? The answer to that question is central for explaining human behavior in psychology and biology. In addition, it also informs our ideas about biological or environmental determinism, standards of normality, conceptions of ethics, and views about individual and social responsibility. Trying to understand all those fundamental issues and their interrelations is what led me to focus on instincts.

One striking feature of the discourse on instincts is the profound “gendering” of some behaviors and emotions. Although the search for instincts aims to locate those characteristics that are part of all human beings, many scientists claimed that human nature came in two forms: male and female. Aggession became the defining instinct for males. And the maternal instinct became the defining characteristic of women’s nature. But how did love become “gendered”? How can we differentiate maternal and parental love? And how did we come to think that maternal love is fundamental to the emotional development of a child?

In this book, I explore ideas about mother love in the United States from World War II until the 1970s. My central claim is that during that period prominent researchers from various fields of study established the view that emotions are an integral part of the self and that mother love determines an individual’s emotional development. One theory in particular played a key role in the establishment and permanence of those views: John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. This was not the only theory that put forth maternal care and love as the cradle of the emotional self, but it has become the most enduring and successful one. My book tries to explain why.

AHP: What were some of the factors that supported the post-WWII move toward envisioning maternal love as a biological instinct? Continue reading Interview with Marga Vicedo on The Nature and Nurture of Love →

More HOP Graphic Novels: It’s Harry Harlow’s Turn

Book Reviews, Books, Resources, , , ,
Cover of Wire Mothers

AHP has previously posted on the relationship between graphic novels and the history of psychology – in terms of psychology’s interactions with the reading of comics, the lie detector-Wonder Woman link, and the ways its history has periodically found its way into the stories themselves (see Freud’s appearance as a superhero and the Kitty Genovese connection to the Watchmen character Rorschach). Thanks to the newly downloaded comiXology app on my iPad, I have another recommendation for AHP readers: “Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love“.

Created in 2007 by Jim Ottaviani and Dylan Meconis for G.T. Labs, the novel – as the title makes clear – focuses on the work of psychologist Harry Harlow. It was released as a part of G.T. Labs’ “science of the unscientific” series (bear with me for a bit here) as a companion to “Levitation: Physics and Psychology in the Service of Deception” (which I’ve only just started to read so perhaps more in a future post?).

Although “Wire Mothers” highlights several aspects of Harlow’s career and alludes to the work of Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, the bulk of the story focuses on Harlow’s best known work with infant rhesus monkeys beginning in the late 1950s. These studies included questions related to the fear responses of these animals (see some original footage), the effects of contact comfort (see The Nature of Love), and the effects of social isolation (see Total Isolation in Monkeys). The authors also seem to capture a fair characterization of Harlow himself.

Overall, the project is well done – ex. the wire and cloth “mothers” will be easily recognizable to Historians of Psychology – and even concludes with a two page list of recommended primary and secondary source readings. This could be a great way to introduce our students to the topic – or perhaps just a fun read this summer when you want to goof off but still feel productive.

 

New Book: The Nature and Nurture of Love

Books, General, , , , , , , , ,

A new volume exploring the history of human instincts has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. In The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America historian of biology Marga Vicedo explores how the idea of instinctual mother love took hold. As described on the publisher’s website,

The notion that maternal care and love will determine a child’s emotional well-being and future personality has become ubiquitous. In countless stories and movies we find that the problems of the protagonists—anything from the fear of romantic commitment to serial killing—stem from their troubled relationships with their mothers during childhood. How did we come to hold these views about the determinant power of mother love over an individual’s emotional development? And what does this vision of mother love entail for children and mothers?

In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo examines scientific views about children’s emotional needs and mother love from World War II until the 1970s, paying particular attention to John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. Vicedo tracks the development of Bowlby’s work as well as the interdisciplinary research that he used to support his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s studies of imprinting in geese, Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of children and mothers in Uganda and the United States. Vicedo’s historical analysis reveals that important psychoanalysts and animal researchers opposed the project of turning emotions into biological instincts. Despite those criticisms, she argues that attachment theory was paramount in turning mother love into a biological need. This shift introduced a new justification for the prescriptive role of biology in human affairs and had profound—and negative—consequences for mothers and for the valuation of mother love.

A Harlow Love Song

Video, ,

For your Friday viewing (and listening) pleasure, we bring you a love song on Harry Harlow’s famous maternal separation and social isolation experiments. In Harlow’s experiments, rhesus monkeys were forced to choose between a terrycloth surrogate mother and a wire surrogate mother equipped with food. Ultimately, the monkeys preferred contact comfort over food, only going to the wire monkey for as long as it took to eat. Set to the tune of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” the song in the video above tells the story of monkeys forced to choose between contact comfort and food. The video was created by teacher Brad Wray and his students at Arundel High School in Maryland.

Read more about Harlow in the recent Observer piece, Love According to Harry Harlow, wherein Deborah Blum revisits a Psychology Today interview with Harlow from 1973. Download the 1973 interview with Harlow here.

via the APS Observer‘s Daily Observations.

Video: History of the Science of Human Instincts

Video, , , ,

Interested in learning more about history of scientific views on human instincts? Marga Vicedo (whose work has been featured on AHP here and here) discusses this history in the video above, focusing especially on the history of views on maternal instincts. Vicedo is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Human Nature and Mother Love: The Search for the Maternal Instinct,” in which she explores evolving views on human instincts from the nineteenth century to the present. Among those whose work Vicedo discusses in the video are ethologist Konrad Lorenz, psychologist Harry Harlow, and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. It is the work of such individuals on attachment theory that has been used as a basis for the idea that individuals have an innate need for mother love. Vicedo argues that the idea that there is an innate need for mother love has been largely accepted by society, with important social consequences.

Special Issue: History of Evolutionary Psychiatry

General, Journals, , , ,

The June 2010 issue of History of Psychiatry, dedicated to “A Hundred Years of Evolutionary Psychiatry (1872-1972),” has just been released online. This special issue features a number of articles of interest to historians of psychology, including, among others, an article on Harry Harlow (left) and the nature of love by Marga Vicedo of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and an article on the work of Lauretta Bender and the African American psyche by Denis Doyle. Titles, authors and abstracts to these and the other articles in the June issue follow below.

“The evolutionary turn in psychiatry: A historical overview,” by Pieter R. Adriaens and Andreas De Block. The abstract reads:

Ever since Darwin, psychiatrists have been tempted to put evolutionary theory to use in their efforts to understand and explain various aspects of mental disorders. Following a number of pivotal developments in the history of evolutionary thought, including degeneration theory, ethology and the modern synthesis, this introductory paper provides an overview of the many trends and schools in the history of ‘psychiatric Darwinism’ and ‘evolutionary psychiatry’. We conclude with an attempt to distinguish three underlying motives in asking evolutionary questions about mental disorders.

“Schizophrenia, evolution and the borders of biology: On Huxley et al.’s 1964 paper in Nature,” by Raf De Bont. The abstract reads: Continue reading Special Issue: History of Evolutionary Psychiatry →

BBC4 Show on Harlow’s Monkeys

General, Interview, Journals, Resources,

Mind Changers, a BBC Radio 4 production which explores the development of psychology in the twentieth century, has just released an episode entitled, Harlow’s Monkeys. Mind Changers, Series 4, has been discussed on AHP previously in relation to the first two episodes of the program which, respectively, discuss the Rosenhan Experiment and the Hawthorne Effect.

As described on the Mind Changers website, in the 30 minute program, host Claudia Hammond,

visits the Primate Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, where Harlow conducted his experiments, and meets his former assistant, Helen LeRoy, and the current director of the lab, Professor Christopher Coe. At the University of Massachussets, Amherst, she meets Harlow’s last PhD student, now Chair of Psychology, Professor Melinda Novak. She also talks to Roger Fouts, Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Washington, about the perceived cruelty of Harlow’s work, and to Dr John Oates, lecturer in the Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at the Open University.

Continue reading BBC4 Show on Harlow’s Monkeys →

History of Mother-Child Research in JHBS

Book Reviews, General, Journals, Resources, ,

The most recent issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavorial Sciences contains several articles on the history of mother-child research. In her article, Marga Vicedo, whose historical work on Konrad Lorenz and mother-child research has previously been discussed on AHP, examines the now infamous work of Harry Harlow on mother love. In “Mothers, machines, and morals: Harry Harlow’s work on primate love from lab to legend” Vicedo examines the oft perpetuated results of Harlow’s attachment research with rhesus monkeys.

In her article, “‘Monkeys, babies, idiots'” and ‘primitives’: Nature-nurture debates and philanthropic foundation support for American anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s,” Kersten Jacobson Biehn looks specifically at the history of American cultural anthropology. Jacobson Biehn’s abstract reads, Continue reading History of Mother-Child Research in JHBS →