Psychology in the Real World: How Touch and Comfort Influence Development
PSYC 1301
Psychology in the Real World: How Touch and Comfort Influence Development
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When we pick up a crying baby and cuddle her close, she stops crying. Why? How important is contact for a developing infant? What purpose does the contact serve? In the early part of the 20th century, psychologists assumed that all babies needed to survive was to have their internal biological needs met – hunger, thirst, and temperature regulation. External needs, including love, affection, and social contact, were considered secondary. According to this view, babies liked being held by their mothers because they had come to associate mom with the ability to satisfy their primary hunger needs. But is this true? We continue to hear stories, even today, of babies who fail to thrive in orphanages because they were not held and cuddled, even though their physical needs were met.
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Harry Harlow
Harry Harlow (1905-1981) questioned theories of the 1950s, which stated that love began as this feeding bond between mother and baby. Harlow thought the baby might desire contact more than a need for food. In his early work (1958), he noticed that baby monkeys whom he had separated from their mothers became very attached to cloth diapers that lined their cages. This strong attachment to cloth made Harlow think that a baby monkey needs something soft to cling to. He was reminded of a baby's attachment to a soft blanket. To test his idea, Harlow and his colleagues carried out a series of studies with newborn rhesus monkeys that they separated from their mothers. Rhesus monkeys are more mature at birth than humans, but like human infants they show a range of emotions and need to be nursed. They housed the baby monkeys with surrogate mothers constructed of wire and wood. One was just a wire frame with a crude head. The other was a wire frame covered with soft terry cloth. Both mothers were heated and either could be hooked up to a bottle of milk.
In the first study, Harlow removed eight monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth. Cloth and wire mothers were housed in cubicles attached to the infants' cages. Half the monkeys were randomly assigned to get milk from the wire monkey; the other half got their milk from the cloth monkey.
Harlow used the amount of time spent with a surrogate mother as a measure of the affection bond. He found that contact comfort was much more important than the source of food in determining which surrogate mother the monkeys preferred. The babies stayed with the wire mother only long enough to get the necessary food. Regardless of whether a baby monkey nursed from the cloth mother or the wire mother, it spent most of its time with the cloth mom, especially if they were scared. When the cloth mother had the bottle, the baby monkeys did not go to the wire mother at all.
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Harlow's findings suggested that the view that babies preferred being with their mothers because the mothers provided food was at least partially incorrect. Harlow went so far as to say that a primary function of nursing in humans was contact as much as nutrition.
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Click here for a video clip of Harlow's experiment.
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Touch and Development
In another study, Harlow found that young monkeys reared with live mothers and young peers learned to play and socialize with the other young monkeys. Although the monkeys with the cloth mothers were slower than those with live mothers, they seemed to catch up within a year. Babies raised with real mothers but with no playmates were often either fearful or inappropriately aggressive.
Tiffany Field and her colleagues (1986) decided to test whether regular touch might help tiny premature infants. She randomly assigned 40 preterm infants from a hospital's newborn intensive care unit to either receive touch therapy (experimental group) or not (control group). All of the premature infants lived in isolettes, plastic-covered bassinets designed to prevent infection. This touch therapy involved gently stroking the baby with warmed hands (no gloves) through portholes in the isolette for 15 minutes, three times a day for 10 days. Over the treatment period, babies who received touch therapy gained significantly more weight than those who did not, even though they did not eat more. Later research showed the same effect in weight gain when mothers touched their preterm infants. Touch also leads to reduced stress levels in premature babies.
Today massage therapy is used to help people with developmental disorders, such as autism. A study of Qigong, a Chinese touch therapy, showed improvement in sensory, social, and basic living skills.
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