Love at Goon Park (41 page)

Babies send their parents nonverbal messages, too. Adults, though, aren't as adept at reading them. Some are easy enough. Infants smile when they are pleased; cling when they need contact; follow with their eyes when they are worried that we may leave. They cry when they want help or comfort—although exactly what they want can be tricky to figure out. If small children aren't reassured, if no one responds, they comfort themselves. In another study, psychologists
placed a bright toy near a baby but just out of her reach. The infants in this study were tested individually—but they mirrored each other's behaviors anyway. The babies were too young to crawl to the ball. They tried, though. The scientists watched as the babies struggled to reach the bright ball, stretching out hands and failing, stretching and failing again.

In frustration, the infants sobbed to themselves. If help still failed to arrive, they would try to calm themselves down. They would suck their thumbs or look deliberately away from the toy. Thumb sucking turns out to be one of those natural resources, an effective way for babies to comfort themselves. Infants also calm themselves by the simple act of looking away. If a parent frustrates, if a toy rolls away and can't be reached, a simple way to cope is to focus on something else. It's a lesson learned in the first months of our lives that holds up well for the rest of our lives.

And that's exactly what babies do. An observant parent can see the child's eyes flick away—to a blanket, a wall, into the air even, but away from the source of unhappiness. If we—as parents—are paying attention, we may recognize this gaze-away as a message to us. The baby needs downtime. Even the smallest humans, the most dependent and connected, sometimes need resting space—the infant equivalent of Zen meditation or a walk alone in a quiet woodland.

What we parents won't see, of course, is the simple, lovely biology that runs stream-like through a baby's response to tranquility. Scientists have been able to track that internal shift in the most straightforward way. When a tired or frustrated baby looks away, her heart rate steadies and drops. If researchers have put a few sensors in place, they can see that change in the green line that indicates heartbeat. It's like watching water change at the sea front, from choppy little waves to smooth shiny swells. Thus the machinery of medicine can track the way the heart begins to ease.

Back in 1983, Ed Tronick at Harvard had begun to consider the power of this interaction between parent and child. It occurred to him that the I-smile-you-smile-back kind of relationship could be
the basis of an interesting experiment. It wasn't the physical smile that interested him so much. It was what it represented—the give and give back between mother and child. When a toy is unreachable, an adult is instructed to respond in that experiment to the baby's signaling for help. The lab assistant will always eventually move the toy into those fat little hands. But what if nothing the baby did elicited a response? What if the toy was left to hover out of reach? What if he crawled to the edge of that cliff, turned, and got nothing from his mother—no gleam of encouragement, no sudden look of alarm? What if an infant could coo and call and coax and find that he has nothing in his box of social skills that will get him an answer?

It was in those questions that Tronick thought he saw a way to tug at the mother-child bond, the tie that Harry Harlow had considered so unbreakable. Tronick came up with what he called the Face-to-Face Still-Face Paradigm. He and a colleague, Jeffrey Cohn, asked the mothers of three-month-olds simply to go blank for a few minutes while looking at their children. The “still face” test demanded only that—a total lack of response. The mother had to present a face frozen into neutrality. No anger or threat. No humor or love. The all-important facial map would show nothing but emotionally empty terrain.

“The effect on the infant is dramatic,” Tronick wrote in an early publication, echoing his own initial astonishment at the power of that still face. “Infants almost immediately detect the change and attempt to solicit the mother's attention.” When a mother still refused to respond, babies tried self-comfort. They sucked their thumbs. They looked away. Then the babies tried again, just to see a little response. They'd reach for their best tools to engage their mothers. Infants would smile, gurgle, and reach. And, as ordered, the mothers would return nothing. The babies would comfort themselves again. Then they would try again. And again. Babies know this matters. They're stubborn about it. But after a while, confronted with only that blank face, each child stopped trying.

“I remember when I first did the still-face paradigm,” says Tronick, who today heads the pediatric research division at Harvard Medical School. He is a tall, elegant man with silvery hair, brilliant blue eyes, and a habit of saying very precisely what he thinks. “I have a sequence of infant photographs from the first study. Pictures of a three-month-old reacting to a mother holding a still face. First, the baby is solicitous, trying to appeal to the mother, then he starts sucking his thumb, and then he just collapses, curls up in a corner.

“I said to people, look, it's like Spitz's babies; it's like the monkeys in Harlow's study. Look at this emotional reaction.” With that perspective, Tronick suddenly found himself at the receiving end of yet another of those Spitz-Bowlby-Harlow reactions. The psychologists he showed the pictures to thought that what they saw couldn't represent emotion. It seemed to Tronick that his colleagues were almost personally uncomfortable with the idea that the connection between mother and child could be so strong. The notion that relationships could matter that much was unnerving. “And people just didn't want to see it that way. It's too close. I think part of the reason that rejection occurs is that there's a denial going on. People don't want to believe that a child could be so hurt—or that we could be so hurtful.”

And that—the willingness to explore the worst of our nature as well as the best—is one of the things that Tronick came to admire in Harry Harlow. Here was a psychologist who never pretended, who was willing to look at even the uncomfortable result. If he thought it was right, he would fight for it. People used to argue to Harry that his lonely baby monkeys just needed more cognitive input, a richer environment, Tronick remembers. Psychologists would insist that the dysfunctional behavior of baby rhesus with cloth mom couldn't possibly have anything to do with emotional needs. “And Harry just refused to back down from his own interpretation, that it was social connection, that it was input from the mother that made the difference. Harry, even when he was doing extreme experiments, always saw the normal side, and that was connection. He was never confused about what mattered.”

During his fifty years in psychology, Harry Harlow explored many research interests. His was never a one-track mind. He had an infinite capacity for curiosity, a compulsive need always to go himself one better. What didn't fascinate him? Harry was interested in the structure of the brain, the biochemistry of behavior, play, mental abilities, and sex differences. But mostly he brought all this together in an exploration of the whole tangled messy business of relationships. If you line up his major works—learning abilities, curiosity, baby care, mother love, touch, social networks, loneliness, stress, abuse, depression—they all fit together into pieces of a living puzzle. Harry believed, entirely, in the power and importance of relationships; and if one is to trace his impact on his field, one should not look at one study, one thought, but at the way the studies and thoughts fit together. In the end, Harry Harlow's vision of the nature of love was a sweeping one. His studies still stand, like bedrock, for psychologists who believe that love matters, that social connection counts, that we are defined as individuals, in part, by our place in the community.

“Relationships with a capital R,” says Sally Mendoza, chair of the psychology department at the University of California-Davis. Mendoza did her graduate work under Gig Levine, during his time at Stanford. She is a calm, friendly woman with a brilliant smile, an infectious laugh, and a razor-sharp mind. Unlike Tronick, she is not a Harlow fan. Mendoza came of age in the rising feminism of the 1970s and finds it hard to like Harry's sarcastic and sometimes misogynistic style. But, even so, she has long believed that the way we connect is absolutely, fundamentally important in understanding ourselves—and any social species.

Even in graduate school, Mendoza was fascinated by relationships. Her idea was that we rarely act in isolation. Social connections influence many of our behaviors, underlie our decisions. Consider an observable behavior—from goofing with a friend to grieving over a lost lover. Mendoza was sure that each interaction was more than visible externally. It also changed internal physiology and chemistry.
Behind her idea lies a provocative theory: that our individual body chemistry is not so individual at all; that each of us is designed, in part, just to respond to the other people in our lives.

If so, then the lyric insistence of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne that “no man is an island” takes on a scientific literalness. We become inseparable from the fine fragile fabric of our relationships. “People told me I was crazy,” Mendoza says. “I'd present this in an audience with people like Frank Beach [a pioneer in the study of hormones and behavior] and everyone would go after me, asking ‘What's the mechanism? Are you saying that just relationships can have an independent effect?'

I'd say, ‘Yes.'

They'd say, ‘How?'

I'd say, ‘I don't know' and they'd say, ‘You're crazy.'

“But Harlow and Bowlby did have a big impact on thinking about relationships,” Mendoza adds. Gradually, the field also recognized that her heretical notions might actually have some credibility. The power of those first cloth mother studies was inescapable, she believes. Who could deny the image of a baby monkey holding as if to a lifeline onto that artificially warmed terrycloth body? There's another study, out of the Harlow lab, that speaks even more to her. It's the Butler box in its “love machine” days. Mendoza could not set aside the image of the little monkey locked inside Butler's box, tirelessly opening a window for a glimpse of his mother. “And that's why I started reading Harlow. He completely strips away everything. Harlow's work tells you that without social support, you are in real trouble. You can end up in pathological personality development.”

Our bodies know this; our brains recognize it subconsciously, even if we cannot accept it intellectually. Or so Mendoza suggests. We spend many of our limited waking minutes on each other. Even office life thrives on gossip and jokes and friendships. Parents with demanding jobs still huddle over homework with their children, cheer them at soccer games, fall asleep reading to them at night. Adult children still telephone their parents long after they no longer
“need” them. We lunch, we date, we party, we spend quiet evenings at home; often the very best minutes of our days are the connected ones. And Mendoza believes that our particular biological nature demands this. If you think of the nature of love as a multifaceted gem of an idea, then our need to belong is a major facet. Without even thinking about it, “we spend a huge amount of time in relationships,” she says. “That should tell us that it's inordinately important, that relationships are critical to biology.”

No one tells Mendoza she's crazy these days. She works in the hot new psychology specialty called the biology of emotions. At the California Regional Primate Research Center, another of the NIH facilities created by Harry Harlow and his colleagues, Mendoza and Bill Mason, among others, have been trying to better define the brain anatomy and neurochemistry that helps sustain those bonds. Mendoza has looked at the intricate squirrel monkey society as an example. She finds that even peripheral relationships matter to these small, tightly networked animals. If Mendoza takes a squirrel monkey out of his group, she can measure a sudden spike in the animal's stress hormones. The rise isn't only in the separated individual. The hormone blazes across the group, even in monkeys who rarely spent time with the missing animal. Everyone registers that someone is missing. She suspects that we humans respond similarly to minor relationship changes—a coworker's leaving, a neighbor's moving on. It's a reminder that we weave our social fabric from many, many threads. There's a reassuring aspect to living in that complex of relationships. If one fails us, there are still others to keep the net stretched beneath us.

“One person may go to a single relationship for everything they need. I rely on a rich network of friends,” Mendoza says. “And I firmly believe that you can make up for a nuclear family more easily than you can make up for friendships. Harlow saw that in monkey communities. The friendship, the peer relationships, the kin networks.” There are different ways of describing Harry's idea that we need many “affectional systems” in our lives—friendships, as Mendoza
says, community as Tronick says—the more the merrier, it takes a village, no man is an island. And Mendoza may be right; certainly Harry would have thought so, that one's nuclear family need not be the only—or even the best—family in our lives. We can and do extend our family circle with friendship and sometimes it's the extended part that matters the most.

“He was ahead of the curve,” says Steve Suomi, “by at least thirty years. He was the first to look seriously at social behavior as it emerges in a developmental sense. He was interested in the layers of relationships, between mothers and infants, infants and other parts of the social world. His work preceded substantially the current argument over who is more important, parents or peers.” As an example, Suomi cites the well-publicized 1998 book,
The Nurture Assumption,
which argued that peers and peer pressure could outweigh parents' influence. Like many researchers concerned about early childhood development, Suomi is wary of the book's message. He thinks the author, Judith Rich Harris, took the modern emphasis on the non-nuclear family to a risky extreme. It's true that his old mentor, Harry Harlow, believed that childhood friends mattered hugely, in part as a trial run for adult relationships. The playful days of early friendships do teach us some of the subtleties of building the social safety net. They can also buffer us against a dysfunctional family. Like Suomi, though, Harry would not have agreed that friendships make our first connections, mother-to-child, unimportant. His perspective was more complex than that.