Physical contact comfort, not feeding, is the root of parental love
Evidence
The baby monkeys, Harlow argued, used their terry cloth mothers as a secure base. Once their initial fright was quelled by comforting contact with the soft mother, they regained their confidence. We don’t love our parents because they feed us, he concluded; we love them because physical contact with our parents provides comforting security. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 106
Categorization
- XREF: Culmination of the chapter’s argument against Freud and Skinner—the canonical attachment findings.
Related
- Twentieth-century psychology long held that babies bond only through feeding (similarity 0.83)
- Contact comfort, not feeding, determines how monkeys respond to stress (similarity 0.82)