Mother-infant relationship in the monkey, Macaca nemestrina: The effect of brief separation and mother-infant specificity.

Abstract

A number of observational studies of freeranging monkeys have indicated a strong attachment between the mother and the infant (Altmann, in press;Carpenter, 1934;Nolte, 1955). Mother-child closeness is prominent in the human and has been referred to as the mother-child tie (Bowlby, 1958). This tie is pre-eminent in the behavior determinants of man although it is not known if it serves comparable importance in subhuman primates. Harlow and Zimmerman (1959) have investigated certain aspects of the mother-child relationship in monkeys by the use of artificial mothers. This technique has yielded much information about the infant's attachment to the mother and has indicated some of the qualities of the effective mother.The study to be reported here is one of a series to delineate the characteristics of the mother-infant tie in the monkey. We have been especially interested in the maternal aspect of mother-infant pairs which have been allowed to remain together from birth. Three questions concerning older infants (5 to 7 months) have prompted this study: (a) What is the effect of brief separation, i.e., for any period less than 1 hr., on the established mother-infant tie? (b) Is the mother's maternal behavior infant-specific at this stage of development? (c) Is the infant's response to the mother at this age mother-specific? METHOD SubjectsTwo mother-infant pairs of pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemistrind) were studied. These pairs were 1 This research was supported in part by a grant from the Boeing Airplane Company's Employees' Medical Research Fund. The authors are also indebted to Theodore C. Ruch and Orville A. Smith, Jr., of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, for provision of laboratory space and subjects and to Donald M. Baer for critical comments on the manuscript.

Rigorous Experiments on Monkey Love: An Account of Harry F. Harlow’s Role in the History of Attachment Theory

“…I believe Gordon Jensen in Colorado actually beat him to the first publication on this topic by two weeks with a much more limited study (Jensen and Tolman 1962), but Harlow was certainly one of the first to study mother-infant separation in monkeys, that is taking away an infant from its mother for a certain amount of time after an attachment bond has clearly been established and then putting it back with the mother. 3 Two years later Hinde did essentially the same thing in a slightly different setting, and indeed maternal separation studies are still being carried out today, but if one goes back to the very first published studies carried out in Harlow's lab (Seay et al 1962, andHarlow 1965), in the Introduction and in the Discussion sections of those papers there is nothing but Bowlby.…”

Is There Mother–Infant Bonding in Primates?

“…This finding concurs with the naturalistic observations of infant adoption in suggesting the existence of a postpartum sensitive period during which separated mothers are likely to adopt an alien infant. Studies such as the Jensen and Tolman (1962), in which macaque mothers were briefly separated from their infants at 5-7 months postpartum and reunited with either their offspring or a strange infant, clearly support the third prediction of the bonding hypothesis, stating that when mother and infant are separated after the bonding period and later reunited, the mother will accept her own infant but reject any other infant. Maternal recognition and acceptance of older offspring has also been demonstrated following long separations, e.g., by a study by Gordon et al (1992) in which rhesus macaque mothers accepted their 2-year-old offspring after an 18-week separation.…”

“…In one of the earliest studies of infant cross-fostering, Jensen and Tolman (1962) briefly separated two individually caged pigtail macaque mothers from their infants, one of which was 5 months old and the other 7 months old. The mothers were then reunited either with their own infant or with the other one.…”

Primate Behavioral Research in the Ussr

“…Voitonis and T ikh analyzed the social behavior of baboons into cohesive and divisive elements. Another excellent example of this form of analysis is to be found in a recent study of the m other-infant relationship in Macaca nemestrina by J ensen and Tolman [4].…”