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The importance of the early affective relationships among caregivers and their infants has a long history of emphasis in both human and animal work. For instance, in the 1930s and 1940s, psychoanalytic scholars such as Sigmund Freud and René Spitz highlighted the importance of the early mother infant relationship for healthy development and alerted the public on the negative consequences of separating children from their caregivers and families (Hofer, 1994). In his reports published between 1939 and 1945, Freud brought attention to the devastating effects of family disruptions during World War II on children’s development (Freud & Burlingham, 1974). Spitz’s (1945) work has shown that children of incarcerated women who were allowed to have affective interactions with their mothers showed better developmental outcomes than institutionalized children who were deprived of nurturing social interactions. In animal research, Konrad Lorenz (1935) – regarded as the founder of ethology – demonstrated that ducklings imprint on the first moving object they see shortly after hatching, which was conceptualized as an early forming “emotional bond” between the mother and her offspring (see Lorenz, 1958).

In the 1940s and 1950s, Harry Harlow’s early work on the negative effects of peer‐rearing in rhesus monkeys’ behaviors also highlighted the importance of early interactions between mothers and their offspring. Harlow is most famously known for his studies examining the maternally deprived infant rhesus monkeys’ preference for the surrogate mothers made from cloth over the ones made from wire. His important conclusion from this line of work was that infants’ attachment to their caregivers is not simply due to the fact that caregivers provide food but rather they often are a source for warmth and comfort through the provision of bodily contact (Harlow & Suomi, 1971). Along with the “surrogate mother” studies, Harlow conducted a series of revolutionary studies on the impact of social deprivation and isolation that largely contributed to the development of Bowlby’s attachment theory (Van Der Horst et al., 2008).

John Bowlby, who is considered the founder of attachment theory, integrated the early psychoanalytic perspectives and ethological work on the role of early caregiver–infant relationships into his theory on attachment (Hofer, 1994). Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1982) conceptualized attachment – the special affective bond between a caregiver and his/her child – as an evolutionary‐based motivational system that allows the infant to maintain and restore proximity to the mother to increase his/her chances of survival. Bowlby noted that, when separated from their mothers, infants first “protest” to this separation by crying, searching, and showing distress signs. The evolutionary function of this behavior is to help the caregiver and offspring find each other. Bowlby suggested that, when the separation lasts longer, infants respond with “despair” showing signs of sadness and withdrawn behaviors that serve to conserve energy and avoid danger in the long absence of the attachment figure. Bowlby indicated that an important feature of the attachment relationship is that it is selective, such that the parent and the infant demonstrate attachment behaviors toward one another but not toward others. Both primates and rodents have been shown to respond to short‐term and long‐term separations from their caregivers in similar ways described by Bowlby (for a review on attachment in rhesus monkeys, see Suomi, 2008; for a review on rodent attachment, see Landers & Sullivan, 2012). These seminal studies provided an important foundation for studying the importance of social interaction. Indeed, Bowlby’s attachment theory, which was built off this foundation of research, is still deemed to be an important conceptual framework for understanding the role of early social relationships and their absence in both animal and human research.