Vertical Chamber Apparatus
The technical name for the new depression chamber was "vertical chamber apparatus," though Harlow himself insisted on calling it the "pit of despair." He had at first wanted to call it the "dungeon of despair," and also used terms like "well of despair," and "well of loneliness." Blum writes that his colleagues tried to persuade him not to use such descriptive terms, that a less visual name would be easier politically. Gene Sackett of the University of Washington in Seattle, one of Harlow's doctoral students who went on to conduct additional deprivation studies, said, "He first wanted to call it a dungeon of despair. Can you imagine the reaction to that?"
Most of the monkeys placed inside it were at least three months old and had already bonded with others. The point of the experiment was to break those bonds in order to create the symptoms of depression. The chamber was a small, metal, inverted pyramid, with slippery sides, slanting down to a point. The monkey was placed in the point. The opening was covered with mesh. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to climb up the slippery sides. After a few days, they gave up. Harlow wrote, "most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless." Stephen J. Suomi, another of Harlow's doctoral students, placed some monkeys in the chamber in 1970 for his PhD. He wrote that he could find no monkey who had any defense against it. Even the happiest monkeys came out damaged. He concluded that even a happy, normal childhood was no defense against depression.
The experiments delivered what science writer Deborah Blum has called "common sense results," namely, that monkeys, normally very social animals in nature, emerge from isolation badly damaged, and that some recover while others do not.
Read more about this topic: Pit Of Despair
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