18.5: Contact Comfort

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Amanda Taintor & Wendy Ruiz

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Harlow's Research

When Bowlby was initially developing his attachment theory, there were alternative theoretical perspectives on why infants were emotionally attached to their primary caregivers (most often, their biological mothers). Bowlby and other theorists, for example, believed that there was something important about the responsiveness and contact provided by mothers. Other theorists, in contrast, argued that young infants feel emotionally connected to their mothers because mothers satisfy more basic needs, such as the need for food. The child comes to feel emotionally connected to the mother because she is associated with the reduction of primary drives, such as hunger, rather than the reduction of drives that might be relational in nature.[1]

In a classic set of studies, psychologist Harry Harlow placed young monkeys in cages that contained two artificial surrogate "mothers" (Harlow, 1958). One of those surrogates was a simple wire contraption; the other was a wire contraption covered in cloth. Both of the surrogate mothers were equipped with a feeding tube so that Harrow and his colleagues had the option to allow the surrogate to deliver or not deliver milk. Harlow found that the young macaques spent a disproportionate amount of time with the cloth surrogate as opposed to the wire surrogate. Moreover, this was true even when the infants were fed by the wire surrogate rather than the cloth surrogate. This suggests that infants' strong emotional bond with their primary caregivers is rooted in something more than whether the caregiver provides food per se. Harlow's research is now regarded as one of the first experimental demonstrations of the importance of "contact comfort" in establishing infant-caregiver bonds.[1]

[1] Attachment Through the Life Course by R. Chris Fraley is licensed under CC: BY-NC-SA