animal behavior can be fascinating and some psychologists spend their entire careers trying to understand why animals act the way they do often these psychological findings are then applied to human behavior this of course can be useful as we can conduct studies on animals that simply wouldn't be possible to do on humans but as you can imagine this animal research can be problematic both ethically and considering the very different mental experiences of animals and humans regarding attachment there are two researchers whose work with animals has been very influential conad Loren's work on G like geese and Henry Harlow's work on Reese's maax so let's look at what they found and discuss if we can apply their findings to human attachment the psych Boost flash card app has a new feature test yourself with over 1,500 multiple choice questions including every topic on a level of gcsc psychology try paper one for free right now and Patron supporters can watch psych boost videos add for learn from over 17 hours of exclusive exam tutorial videos and access hundreds of digital and printable resources including my Maps quiz sheets worksheets teaching slides and more animal studies of attachment Loren this is Loren he investigated imprinting and you've likely seen the results of imprinting whenever you've seen young ducklings following the M around the pond this behavior is common in birds and Loren decided to test what made animals imprint to test imprinting he randomly divided a clutch of gray like goose eggs half he left to hatch naturally with a biological mother and the other half he hatched in an incubator making sure that he was the first thing the goslings he hatched saw in some later studies he tested the limits of imprinting by making the goslings wait before seeing any moving object theen found the goslings hatched by their mother followed her and the goslings he hatched imprinted on him following him closely when Loren mixed all of the goslings in a box and the box was lifted the goslings who were imprinted on him ran to him and the goslings who had imprinted on the Mother Goose ran to her he also found there was a limit to how long a goling could go without imprinting before losing the ability around 32 hours he turned this the critical period if the goslings hadn't been able to imprint by this point they lost the ability Lorenzo's work provides evidence for a biological aspect to attachment behavior in birds and that the process of imprinting is based on Vision animal studies of attachment harow this researcher is har his experiment tested the C love theory of attachment based on learning theory C love suggests that infants love their mothers because they feed them this is because the infants form an association between food and the mother the third attachment video will discuss the the in more detail harow removed infant monkeys from their mother soon after birth and place them in a cage in the cage were two surrogate mothers one made of wire with a bottle filled of milk and one a cloth mother that didn't provide food but did provide Comfort the time the monkeys spent with each Sur mother was carefully recorded Hollow also frightened the infant monkeys with a mechanical monkey to see which surrogate mother they would run towards yeah it was a pretty horrible experiment Hollow found the monkeys spent the majority of their time with the cloth mother not W mother they visited the wi mother but just to feed after they had fed they returned to the cloth mother when Hollow frightened the monkeys they ran to the cloth mother the monkeys and Hollow studies suffered maternal deprivation a t we'll discuss in more detail in the fifth attachment video in later followup research Hollow found the monkeys he experimented on had long-term problems interacting with other monkeys and raising their infants from these findings H rejected the covered of fairy as the monkeys had not attached the wi mother with the food at all instead har argued that animals like the maak in his study have an innate need for physical contact evaluations as Loren and Harlow's research was on animal models we should first consider whether it's valid to apply these findings to humans animals and humans are very different biologically we have more complex brain structure than most animals and our society and culture influence our Behavior animals are thought to act more on Instinct while humans plan their actions over the long term higher order primates like howow Macs are the closest animals genetically to humans but they are still very different from humans so findings on their behavior should only be applied to humans very carefully despite these concerns researchers have considered whether there are lessons to be learned about human behavior from these animal studies one researcher who us these findings and his theories is John Balby a researcher will return to multiple times in this attachment unit Bobby argued that similar to Max in H's research human infants crave comfort from their mothers attempting to form what he termed a monotropic relationship if human infants fail to develop this Bond due to maternal deprivation Balby argued that humans would have poor social abilities similar to the monkeys Balby also claimed like the godlings in Loren's study human infants have a critical period in which they need to form an attachment Bobby argued for humans this was from 6 to 30 months after this point the damage would be irreversible however while it's true that goslings have a critical period later research looking at deprived human orphans who later receive suitable care showed recovery indicating humans have a sensitive not a critical period as knowledge gain from harlo Len's work was developed by Balby and so ultimately informed child care practice we can argue these practical applications can be traced by back to Har and Len's work as examples knowledge of imprinting is linked to why midwives encourage immediate physical contact between the mother and their babies and seeing the poor outcomes of deprived infant maacs is part of the reason Social Service workers are so active in investigating cases of infant neglect understanding the potential for long-term harm finally the evaluation I imagine many of you expected to see Harlow's research was unethical his subjects were primates and clearly experienced suffering from being removed from their mothers and being subjected to stressful situations as well as causing harm to the animals this type of research harms psychology reputation with the general public while both of these things are true hollow's work did influence later researchers like Balby ultimately leading to an understanding of the importance of early attachment that's has changed policies around infant care these policies have improve the lives of millions of infants taking a cost benefit perspective some people would argue that Harlow's research was justified before we finish I need to make a quick General point about ethical evaluations while they are effective evaluations in the right essay keep in mind if a study is unethical as much as we might not like it this doesn't actually tell us if the data collected is valid or not so in this case if a question asks what hollow's research tells us about human behavior talking about hollow's work being unethical is it going to answer that question keep this in mind for other famously unethical studies in psychology I want to thank everyone over on patreon for supporting the channel because of you I've been able to teach part-time meaning I can make psych boost on YouTube for everyone and a special thank you to cat posnik and ammed Romani for supporting at the developer level I do have extra resources that are exclusive to my patrons so if you decide to sign up you can grab those over my website and these include over a 100 exam question tutorial videos of course including questions on the attachment unit I hope this was helpful and I'll see you in the next psych Boost video yeah