Uputstva za kolokvijum za sve studente

U drugom semestru esej za kolokvijum piše se kod kuće i predaje na prvom predavanju posle reading week, sa naslovnom stranom na kojoj se nalazi naziv teme i ime, prezime i broj indeksa autora, uz izjavu o validnosti akademskog rada. Rad ne bi trebalo da bude (mnogo) duži od 3 stranice teksta sa duplim proredom, veličina fonta 12.

Izabranu temu treba istražiti, bar delimično koristeći literaturu na engleskom jeziku. Svaki citat i parafraza treba da se navede u fusnotama ili zagradama, a na kraju rada treba navesti svu korišćenu literaturu ("References", "Sources" ili "Literature").

Ponuđene teme su izuzetno široke i treba ih shvatiti kao smernice u okviru kojih treba pronaći konkretnu, užu temu (npr. u okviru "Gender" moglo bi se pisati na temu "The depiction of gender stereotypes in beer commercials"). Takođe se može izabrati gotovo bilo koja slobodna tema, ukoliko se o njoj može naći literatura na engleskom jeziku i napisati koherentan i suvisao tekst.

Studenti na daljinu i studenti koji nisu u mogućnosti da lično predaju rad mogu ga poslati na igrutinovic@sezampro.rs , a na tu adresu se mogu postavljati i sva dodatna pitanja.

Kolokvijum za II grupu I godine FMK

Teme za eseje su:

- Gender
- Reproductive issues
- Free topic

Rok za predaju radova je petak, 10. april 2009.

Pogledati post "Uputstva za kolokvijum za sve studente".

Kolokvijum za I grupu I godine FMK

Teme za eseje su:

- Gender
- Reproductive issues
- Free topic

Rok za predaju radova je četvrtak, 9. april 2009.

Pogledati post "Uputstva za kolokvijum za sve studente".

Kolokvijum za studente II godine FMK

Teme za eseje su:

- Gender
- Reproductive issues
- Free topic

Rok za predaju radova je sreda, 8. april 2009.

Pogledati post "Uputstva za kolokvijum za sve studente".

Kolokvijum za studente psihologije

Teme za eseje su:

- Morality/Ethics and Psychology
- Attachment
- Learning
- My favorite ... (school / type of therapy / etc.)
- Free topic

Rok za predaju radova je utorak, 7. april 2009.

Pogledati post "Uputstva za kolokvijum za sve studente".

English psy terms, courtesy of Jelena Pesic :)

Learning

Extinction — The weakening of the conditioned response in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus; A previously reinforced response is no longer reinforced and there is decreased tendency to perform the response.

Counterconditioning — A procedure for weakening a CR by associating the fear-provoking stimulus with a new response incompatible with the fear.

Operant Conditioning: Form of learning in which the consequences of behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior’s occurrence. The behavior operates on the environments, and the environment in turn operates on the behavior.

Law of Effect — Behaviors followed by positive outcomes are strengthen, whereas behaviors followed by negative outcomes are weakened.

S-R Theory — Organism’s behavior is due to a connection between a stimulus and a response.
Thorndike’s view: The correct stimulus-response association strengths and the incorrect association weakens because of the consequences of the organism’s actions

B. F. Skinner: Developed concept of operant conditioning. Presented idea of scientifically managed society (utopian society through behavioral control)

Skinner box:
Reinforcement (reward) — A consequence that increases the probability that a behavior will occur. Positive Reinforcement (the frequency of a response increases because it is followed by a stimulus); Negative Reinforcement (the frequency of a response increases because the response is either removes a stimulus or involves avoiding the stimulus). Punishment (a consequence that decreases the probability that a behavior will occur).

Shaping — the process of rewarding approximations of desired behavior.

Primary Reinforcement: involves the use of reinforces that are innately satisfying, that is they do not take any learning on the organism’s part to make them pleasurable.

Secondary Reinforcement acquires its positive value through experience; secondary reinforces are learned or conditioned reinforces.

Schedules of Reinforcement, partial Reinforcement- "timetables" that determine when a response will be reinforced.

Applied behavior analysis (behavior modification) — Application of operant condition principles to change human behavior.

Observational Learning — (imitation or modeling) Learning that occurs when a person observes and imitates someone’s behavior.

-S-O-R Model — A model of learning that gives some importance to cognitive factors: S=stimulus, O=organism, "black box", R=response

Dodatne obaveze za studente na daljinu u drugom semestru

Kao i u prvom, i u drugom semestru studenti na daljinu treba na napišu jedan dodatan esej od oko 200 reči da bi ostvarili pravo na 25 poena za prisustvo predavanjima.

Esej se može pisati na bilo koju temu, a za one kojima treba inspiracija predlažu se teme:

- My pet peeve
- Nothing to kill or die for?
- An issue I'm passionate about

Radove slati na igrutinovic@sezampro.rs

Tekst za psihologe (24. 03.)

Attachment Theory

What is Attachment?

Attachment is an emotional bond to another person. Psychologist John Bowlby was the first attachment theorist, describing attachment as a "lasting psychological connectedness between human beings" (Bowlby, 1969, p. 194). Bowlby believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact that continues throughout life. According to Bowlby, attachment also serves to keep the infant close to the mother, thus improving the child's chances of survival. The central theme of attachment theory is that mothers who are available and responsive to their infant's needs establish a sense of security. The infant knows that the caregiver is dependable, which creates a secure base for the child to then explore the world.

Characteristics of Attachment


Safe Haven: When the child feel threatened or afraid, he or she can return to the caregiver for comfort and soothing.

Secure Base: The caregiver provides a secure and dependable base for the child to explore the world.

Proximity Maintenance: The child strives to stay near the caregiver, thus keeping the child safe.
Separation Distress: When separated from the caregiver, the child will become upset and distressed.


Ainsworth's "Strange Situation"

In her 1970's research, psychologist Mary Ainsworth expanded greatly upon Bowlby's original work. Her groundbreaking "Strange Situation" study revealed the profound effects of attachment on behavior. In the study, researchers observed children between the ages of 12 and 18 months as they responded to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mothers (Ainsworth, 1978). Based upon the responses the researchers observed, Ainsworth described three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment. Later, researchers Main and Solomon (1986) added a fourth attachment style called disorganized-insecure attachment based upon their own research. A number of studies since that time have supported Ainsworth’s attachment styles and have indicated that attachment styles also have an impact on behaviors later in life.


Characteristics of Attachment

Characteristics of Secure Attachment

Securely attached children exhibit minimal distress when separated from caregivers. Remember, these children feel secure and able to depend on their adult caregivers. When the adult leaves, the child feels assured that the parent or caregiver will return.
When frightened, securely attached children will seek comfort from caregivers. These children know their parent or caregiver will provide comfort and reassurance, so they are comfortable seeking them out in times of need.

Characteristics of Ambivalent Attachment

Ambivalently attached children usually become very distressed when a parent leaves. This attachment style is considered relatively uncommon, affecting an estimated 7-15% of U.S. children. Research suggests that ambivalent attachment is a result of poor maternal availability. These children cannot depend on their mother (or caregiver) to be there when the child is in need.

Characteristics of Avoidant Attachment

Children with an avoidant attachment tend to avoid parents or caregivers. When offered a choice, these children will show no preference between a caregiver and a complete stranger. Research has suggested that this attachment style might be a result of abusive or neglectful caregivers. Children who are punished for relying on a caregiver will learn to avoid seeking help in the future.

Problems with Attachment

What happens to children who do not form secure attachments? Research suggests that failure to form secure attachments early in life can have a negative impact on behavior in later childhood and throughout the life. Children diagnosed with oppositional-defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) frequently display attachment problems, possibly due to early abuse, neglect, or trauma. Clinicians suggest that children adopted after the age of six months have a higher risk of problems with attachment. While attachment styles displayed in adulthood are not necessarily the same as those seen in infancy, research suggests that early attachments can have a serious impact on later relationships. For example, those who are securely attached in childhood tend to have good self-esteem, strong romantic relationships, and the ability to self-disclose to others.

za studente psihologije - Asch & Harlow

The Asch Conformilty Experiments

Do you think of yourself as a conformist or a non-conformist? If you are like most people, you probably believe that you are non-conformist enough to stand up to a group when you know you are right, but conformist enough to blend in with the rest of your peers.
Imagine yourself in this situation: You've signed up to participate in a psychology experiment in which you are asked to complete a vision test. Seated in a room with the other participants, you are shown a line segment and then asked to choose the matching line from a group three segments of different lengths. The experimenter asks each participant individually to select the matching line segment. On some occasions everyone in the group chooses the correct line, but occasionally, the other participants unanimously declare that a different line is actually the correct match.
So what do you do when the experimenter asks you which line is the right match? Do you go with your initial response, or do you choose to conform to the rest of the group?
What Were the Asch Conformity Experiments?:
In psychological terms, conformity refers to an individual's tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which he or she belongs. Researchers have long been interested in the degree to which people follow or rebel against social norms. During the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the powers of conformity in groups.
In Asch's experiments, students were told that they were participating in a 'vision test.' Unbeknownst to the subject, the other participants in the experiment were all confederates, or assistants of the experimenter. At first, the confederates answered the questions correctly, but eventually began providing incorrect answers.
Results of the Asch Conformity Experiments:
Nearly 75 percent of the participants in the conformity experiments went along with the rest of the group at least one time. After combining the trials, the results indicated that participants conformed to the incorrect group answer approximately one-third of the time. In order to ensure that participants were able to accurately gauge the length of the lines, participants were asked to individually write down the correct match. According to these results, participants were very accurate in their line judgments, choosing the correct answer 98 percent of the time.
The experiments also looked at how the number of group members impacts conformity. When just one other confederate was present, there was virtually no impact on participants' answers. The presence of two confederates had only a tiny effect. The level of conformity seen with three or more confederates was far more significant.
Asch also found that having one of the confederates give the correct answer while the rest of the confederates gave the incorrect answer dramatically lowered conformity. In this situation, just five to ten percent of the participants conformed to the rest of the group. Later studies have also supported this finding (Morris & Miller, 1975), suggesting that having social support is an important tool in combating conformity.
What Do the Results of the Asch Conformity Experiments Indicate?:
At the conclusion of the experiments, participants were asked why they had gone along with the rest of the group. In most cases, the students stated that while they knew the rest of the group was wrong, they did not want to risk facing ridicule. A few of the participants suggested that they actually believed the other members of the group were correct in their answers.
These results suggest that conformity can be influence both by a need to fit in and a belief that other people are smarter or better informed. Given the level of conformity seen in Asch's experiments, conformity can be even stronger in real-life situations where stimuli are more ambiguous or more difficult to judge.
Criticisms of the Asch Conformity Experiments
One of the major criticism centers on the reasons why participants choose to conform. According to some critics, individuals may have actually been motivated to avoid conflict, rather than an actual desire to conform to the rest of the group.
Another criticism is that the results of the experiment in the lab may not generalize to real world situations. However, many social psychology experts believe that while real-world situations may not be as clear cut as they are in the lab, the actual social pressure to conform is probably much greater, which can dramatically increase conforming behaviors.
Contribution to Psychology
The Asch conformity experiments are among the most famous in psychology's history and have inspired a wealth of additional research on conformity and group behavior.




Harry Harlow and the Nature of Love


During the first half of the 20th century, many psychologists believed that showing affection towards children was merely a sentimental gesture that served no real purpose. Behaviorist John B. Watson once even went so far as to warn parents, "When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument." According to many thinkers of the day, affection would only spread diseases and lead to adult psychological problems.
During this time, psychologists were motivated to prove their field as a rigorous science. The behaviorist movement dominated psychology and urged researchers to study only observable and measurable behaviors. An American psychologist named Harry Harlow, however, became interested in studying a topic that was not so easy to quantify and measure: love.
In a series of controversial experiments conducted in 1960s, Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love. By showing the devastating effects of deprivation on young rhesus monkeys, Harlow revealed the importance of a mother's love for healthy childhood development. His experiments were often unethical and shockingly cruel, yet they uncovered fundamental truths that have heavily influenced our understanding of child development.

The Wire Mother Experiment:

Harlow noted that very little attention had been devoted to the experimental research of love. "Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalyst," he noted (Harlow, 1958).
Many of the existing theories of love centered on the idea that the earliest attachment between a mother and child was merely a means for the child to obtain food, relieve thirst, and avoid pain. Harlow, however, believed that this behavioral view of mother-child attachment was an inadequate explanation.
Harlow’s most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different “mothers.” One was made of soft terrycloth, but provided no food. The other was made of wire, but provided food from an attached baby bottle.
Harlow removed young monkeys from their natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be "raised" by these mother surrogates. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with their cloth mother than with their wire mother. “These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance,” Harlow explained (1958).

Fear, Security, and Attachment:

In a later experiment, Harlow demonstrated that young monkeys would also turn to their cloth surrogate mother for comfort and security. Using a strange situation similar to the one created by attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth, Harlow allowed the young monkeys to explore a room either in the presence of their surrogate mother or in her absence. Monkeys in the presence of their mother would use her as a secure base to explore the room.
When the surrogate mothers were removed from the room, the effects were dramatic. The young monkeys no longer had their secure base to explore the room and would often freeze up, crouch, rock, scream, and cry.

The Impact of Harlow’s Research:

While many experts derided the importance of parental love and affection, Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital for normal childhood development. Additional experiments by Harlow revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to profound psychological and emotional distress and even death. Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups and child care providers approached the care of children.
While Harry Harlow's work led to acclaim and generated a wealth of research on love, affection, and interpersonal relationships, his own personal life soon began to crumble. After the terminal illness of his wife, he became engulfed by alcoholism and depression, eventually becoming estranged from his own children. Colleagues frequently described him as sarcastic, mean-spirited, misanthropic, chauvinistic, and cruel. Yet Harlow's enduring legacy reinforced the importance of emotional support, affection, and love in the development of children.

Tekst I i II godinu FMK (11.-13. mart) - povodom 8. marta ;)

Shouldn't Men Have a Choice, Too?

By Glenn Sacks


Jennifer was crushed when she was told that a baby was on the way. She wants to have children, but the right way--after she has found the right person and is married. But in Jennifer's country, she has no choice. "Jenn" cannot give the child up for adoption, and she cannot terminate the pregnancy. It is her burden to bear, for the next two decades, like it or not.

What country is it which compels a person to have a child they don't want? Afghanistan? Saudi Arabia?

No, it's the United States--not for Jenn, but for Ken.

Ken Johnson, a 10 year veteran of the Seattle Fire Department, wanted to be a father, but with the right woman, and at the right time. Three years ago he and his wife separated after six years of marriage, and each began to date. During this time, according to court documents filed in Snohomish County, Washington, Ken had a brief affair with "Cathy," which resulted in a pregnancy. Ken's legal complaint alleges that he begged Cathy to put the child up for adoption or to terminate the pregnancy, but Cathy refused. Now Ken and his wife, who reconciled two and a half years ago, can't start a family of their own because almost half of Ken's net income from the Seattle Fire Department goes to support the child he didn't want to have. He says:

"People tell me that Cathy should have the choice whether to keep the child or not because it's her body so it's her choice. I agree. But what about my body? I make my living rushing into burning buildings. I put my life and my safety on the line every time I go to work, and now I'm on the hook for 18 years. With the child support demands on me, there's no way I'll ever be able to quit. What about my choice?"

Johnson is part of a growing movement of men who bristle at being "coerced fathers," and who have enlisted in a "Choice for Men" movement whose goals are every bit as legitimate as the goals of the women's reproductive rights movement. They note that one million American women legally walk away from motherhood every year by either adoption, abortion, or abandonment, and demand that men, like women, be given reproductive options. They point out that, unlike women, men have no reliable contraception available to them, since the failure rate of condoms is substantial, and vasectomies are generally only worthwhile for older men who have already married and had children. And they emphasize that, with long backlogs of stable, two-parent families looking for babies to adopt, there is no reason for any child born out of wedlock to a "coerced father" to be without a good home.

The Choice for Men movement seeks to give "coerced fathers" the right to relinquish their parental rights and responsibilities within a month of learning of a pregnancy, just as mothers do when they choose to give their children up for adoption. These men would be obligated to provide legitimate financial compensation to cover natal medical expenses, the mother's loss of income during pregnancy, etc. The right would only apply to pregnancies which occurred outside of marriage.

Some of those who fought for women's reproductive choices agree with choice for men. Karen DeCrow, former president of the National Organization for Women, writes:

"If a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring a pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support ... autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice."
To date, courts have refused to consider fathers' reproductive rights even in the most extreme cases, including: when child support is demanded from men who were as young as 12 when they were statutorily raped by older women; when women have taken the semen from a used condom and inserted it in themselves, including from condoms used only in oral sex; and when women concealed the pregnancy from the man (denying him the right to be a father) and then sued for back and current child support eight or ten years later.

"It doesn't make sense to me," Ken's wife Patti says. "The courts force my husband and I to support a child he never agreed to, but make it financially impossible for him to have a child with the woman he loves and married."

Tekst za iduće predavanje I godine

What’s Wrong With Cinderella?

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
Published: December 24, 2006

I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.Skip to next paragraph
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”
She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.
“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”
My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”
•
Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.
Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.
When my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom — something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me — I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?
On the other hand, maybe I’m still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can “have it all.” Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what’s wrong with that?
•
The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive, playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for core products (say, Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of new media. What’s more, Disney films like “A Bug’s Life” in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities — what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?
It was about a month after Mooney’s arrival that the magic struck. That’s when he flew to Phoenix to check out his first “Disney on Ice” show. “Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses,” he told me last summer in his palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking in a rolling Scottish burr. “They weren’t even Disney products. They were generic princess products they’d appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, ‘O.K., let’s establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they’re doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.’ ”
Mooney picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film’s release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual “mythologies,” the princesses never make eye contact when they’re grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others’ presence.
It is also worth noting that not all of the ladies are of royal extraction. Part of the genius of “Princess” is that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally a Princess, though her reign didn’t last. “We’d always debate over whether she was really a part of the Princess mythology,” Mooney recalled. “She really wasn’t.” Likewise, Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on Princess merchandise, though for a different reason. Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu, which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her liberated warrior’s gear.)
The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores. “We simply gave girls what they wanted,” Mooney said of the line’s success, “although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It’s a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then you have a very healthy business.”
Every reporter Mooney talks to asks some version of my next question: Aren’t the Princesses, who are interested only in clothes, jewelry and cadging the handsome prince, somewhat retrograde role models?
“Look,” he said, “I have friends whose son went through the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over what they must’ve done wrong. Then they talked to other parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be.”
•
At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she shouted.
“Um, yeah,” I said, trying not to meet the other mother’s hostile gaze.
“Don’t you like her blue dress, Mama?”
I had to admit, I did.
She thought about this. “Then don’t you like her face?”
“Her face is all right,” I said, noncommittally, though I’m not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”
Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times, as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks — all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart — as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?
According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers. What better way to assure that they’ll always remain themselves? If that’s the case, score one for Mooney. By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.
“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”
It’s hard to imagine that girls’ options could truly be shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a stroll through a children’s store lately? At Toys “R” Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens, shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance from the “Star Wars” figures, GeoTrax and tool chests. The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it’s easier this way.
Easier, that is, unless you want to buy your daughter something that isn’t pink. Girls’ obsession with that color may seem like something they’re born with, like the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it ain’t so. When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)
The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through “Ally McBeal,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female.
A few days later, I picked my daughter up from preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on her head. “Look, Mommy, I’m Ariel!” she crowed, referring to Disney’s Little Mermaid. Then she stopped and furrowed her brow. “Mommy, do you like Ariel?”
I considered her for a moment. Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never really know. In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female. Maybe the best I can hope for is that her generation will get a little further with the solutions than we did.
For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my daughter a hug.
She smiled happily. “But, Mommy?” she added. “When I grow up, I’m still going to be a fireman.”

Psihologija: tekst sa predavanja od 03. 03.

The Milgram Obedience Experiment


"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974 If a person in a position of authority ordered you to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person, would you follow orders? Most people would answer this question with an adamant no, but Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of obedience experiments during the 1960s that demonstrated surprising results. These experiments offer a powerful and disturbing look into the power of authority and obedience.
Introduction
Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolph Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was simply following orders when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest. In his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, Milgram posed the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"
Method
The participants in the study were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. In exchange for their participation, each person was paid $4.50. Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 30 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock" and "danger: severe shock." The final two switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX." Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student" every time an incorrect answer was produced. While the participant believed that he was delivering real shocks to the student, the student was actually a confederate in the experiment who would pretend to be shocked. As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once the 300-volt level had been reached, the learner banged on the wall and demanded to be released. Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock. Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter issued a series of commands to prod the participant along:

Please continue.
The experiment requires that you continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice, you must go on.

Results
The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience. How far do you think that most participants were willing to go? When Milgram posed this question to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks. Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end. Because of concerns about the amount of anxiety experienced by many of the participants, all subjects were debriefed at the end of the experiment to explain the procedures and the use of deception. However, many critics of the study have argued that many of the participants were still confused about the exact nature of the experiment. Milgram later surveyed the participants and found that 84% were glad to have participated, while only 1% regretted their involvement.
Discussion
While Milgram’s research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments, his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments. Thomas Blass (1999) reviewed further research on obedience and found that Milgram’s findings hold true in other experiments. Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly sadistic act on the instruction of an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are a number of factors about the situation that can explain such high levels of obedience:

The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance.
The fact that the study was sponsored by Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.
The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.
Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.
The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.

Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the experimenters orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks. "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority" (Milgram, 1974). Milgram’s study has become a classic in psychology, demonstrating the dangers of obedience. While this experiment suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining obedience, other psychologists argue that obedience is heavily influenced by both external and internal factors, such as personal beliefs and overall temperament.

II godina, II grupa - predavanje od 25. februara

Framework 3: p. 63 'Citibrief' (crimes in cities) - the text, the comprehension questions and the vocabulary ex.

The students were then asked to discuss Kohlberg's 'Heinz' dilemma:

The Heinz Dilemma




In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should the husband have done that?




Why or why not? Try to convince others in your group that your view is correct.

Psihologija: tekst sa predavanja od 24. 02.

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development


Moral development is a topic of interest in both psychology and education. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg modified and expanded upon Piaget's work to form a theory that explained the development of moral reasoning. Kohlberg’s theory of moral development outlined six stages within three different levels. Kohlberg extended Piaget’s theory, proposing that moral development is a continual process that occurs throughout the lifespan.


"The Heinz Dilemma"

Kohlberg based his theory upon research and interviews with groups of young children. A series of moral dilemmas were presented to children, who were then interviewed to determine the reasoning behind their judgments of each scenario. The following is one example of the dilemmas Kohlberg presented.In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963)."Kohlberg was not interested so much in the answer to the question of whether Heinz was wrong or right, but in the reasoning for the participants decision. The responses were then classified into various stages of reasoning in his theory of moral development.


Level 1. Preconventional Morality

The pre-conventional level of moral reasoning is especially common in children, although adults can also exhibit this level of reasoning. Reasoners in the pre-conventional level judge the morality of an action by its direct consequences. The pre-conventional level consists of the first and second stages of moral development, and is purely concerned with the self in an egocentric manner.

Stage 1 - Obedience and Punishment

The earliest stage of moral development is especially common in young children, but adults are capable of expressing this type of reasoning. At this stage, children see rules as fixed and absolute. Obeying the rules is important because it is a means to avoid punishment. Individuals focus on the direct consequences that their actions will have for themselves. For example, an action is perceived as morally wrong if the person who commits it gets punished. "The last time I did that I was put in time-out so I will not do it again". The worse the punishment for the act is, the more 'bad' the act is perceived to be. This can give rise to an inference that even innocent victims are guilty in proportion to their suffering. It is "egocentric", lacking recognition that others' points of view are different from one's own view.

Stage 2 - Individualism and Exchange

At this stage of moral development, children account for individual points of view and judge actions based on how they serve individual needs. In the Heinz dilemma, children argued that the best course of action was whichever best served Heinz’s needs. Reciprocity is possible, but only if it serves one's own interests. In stage two concern for others is not based on loyalty or intrinsic respect. Lacking a perspective of society in the pre-conventional level, this should not be confused with social contract (stage five), as all actions are performed to serve one's own needs or interests. For the stage two theorist, the perspective of the world is often seen as morally relative.

Level 2. Conventional Morality

The conventional level of moral reasoning is typical of adolescents and adults. Persons who reason in a conventional way judge the morality of actions by comparing these actions to societal views and expectations. The conventional level consists of the third and fourth stages of moral development.

Stage 3 - Interpersonal Relationships

This stage of moral development is focused on living up to social expectations and roles. There is an emphasis on conformity, being "nice," and consideration of how choices influence relationships. The self enters society by filling social roles. Individuals are receptive of approval or disapproval from other people as it reflects society's accordance with the perceived role. They try to be a good boy or good girl to live up to these expectations, having learned that there is inherent value in doing so. Stage three reasoning may judge the morality of an action by evaluating its consequences in terms of a person's relationships, which now begin to include things like respect and gratitude. "I want to be liked and thought well of; apparently, not being naughty makes people like me." Desire to maintain rules and authority exists only to further support these social roles.

Stage 4 - Maintaining Social Order

At this stage of moral development, people begin to consider society as a whole when making judgments. The focus is on maintaining law and order by following the rules, doing one’s duty, and respecting authority. It is important to obey laws and social conventions because of their importance in maintaining a functioning society. Moral reasoning in stage four is thus beyond the need for individual approval exhibited in stage three; society must learn to transcend individual needs. A central ideal or ideals often prescribe what is right and wrong, such as in the case of fundamentalism. If one person violates a law, perhaps everyone would - thus there is an obligation and a duty to uphold laws and rules. When someone does violate a law, it is morally wrong; culpability is thus a significant factor in this stage as it separates the bad domains from the good ones. Most active members of society remain at Stage four, where morality is still predominantly dictated by an outside force.

Level 3. Postconventional Morality

The post-conventional level, also known as the principled level, consists of stages five and six of moral development. Realization that individuals are separate entities from society now becomes prominent. One's own perspective should be viewed before the society. It is due to this 'nature of self before others' that the post-conventional level, especially stage six, is sometimes mistaken for pre-conventional behaviors.

Stage 5 - Social Contract and Individual Rights

At this stage, individuals are viewed as holding different opinions and values. Along a similar vein, laws are regarded as social contracts rather than rigid dictums. Those that do not promote the general welfare should be changed when necessary to meet the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This is attained through majority decision, and inevitably compromise. In this way democratic government is ostensibly based on stage five reasoning.

Stage 6 - Universal Principles

Kolhberg’s final level of moral reasoning is based upon universal ethical principles and abstract reasoning. At this stage, people follow these internalized principles of justice, even if they conflict with laws and rules. Laws are valid only insofar as they are grounded in justice, and that a commitment to justice carries with it an obligation to disobey unjust laws. Decisions are not met hypothetically in a conditional way but rather categorically in an absolute way. Action is never a means but always an end in itself; one acts because it is right, and not because it is instrumental, expected, legal or previously agreed upon. While Kohlberg insisted that stage six exists, he had difficulty finding participants who consistently used it. It appears that people rarely reach stage six of Kohlberg's model.

Below are some of many examples of possible arguments that belong to the six stages:
Stage one (obedience): Heinz should not steal the medicine because he will consequently be put in prison which will mean he is a bad person. Or: Heinz should steal the medicine because it is only worth $200 and not how much the druggist wanted for it; Heinz had even offered to pay for it and was not stealing anything else.
Stage two (self-interest): Heinz should steal the medicine because he will be much happier if he saves his wife, even if he will have to serve a prison sentence. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because prison is an awful place, and he would probably languish over a jail cell more than his wife's death.
Stage three (conformity): Heinz should steal the medicine because his wife expects it; he wants to be a good husband. Or: Heinz should not steal the drug because stealing is bad and he is not a criminal; he tried to do everything he could without breaking the law, you cannot blame him.
Stage four (law-and-order): Heinz should not steal the medicine because the law prohibits stealing, making it illegal. Or: Heinz should steal the drug for his wife but also take the prescribed punishment for the crime as well as paying the druggist what he is owed. Criminals cannot just run around without regard for the law; actions have consequences.
Stage five (human rights): Heinz should steal the medicine because everyone has a right to choose life, regardless of the law. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because the scientist has a right to fair compensation. Even if his wife is sick, it does not make his actions right.
Stage six (universal human ethics): Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine, because others may need the medicine just as badly, and their lives are equally significant.



Further stages
In his empirical studies of persons across their life-span, Kohlberg came to notice that some people evidently had undergone moral stage regression. He was faced with the option of either conceding that moral regression could occur, or revising his theory. Kohlberg chose the latter, postulating the existence of sub-stages wherein the emerging stage has not yet been adequately integrated into the personality. In particular, Kohlberg noted of a stage 4½ or 4+, which is a transition from stage four to stage five, sharing characteristics of both. In this stage the individual has become disaffected with the arbitrary nature of law and order reasoning. Culpability is frequently turned from being defined by society to having society itself be culpable. This stage is often mistaken for the moral relativism of stage two as the individual views the interests of society which conflict with their own choices as relatively and morally wrong. Kohlberg noted that this was often seen in students entering college.
Kohlberg further speculated that a seventh stage may exist (Transcendental Morality or Morality of Cosmic Orientation) which would link religion with moral reasoning. However, because of Kohlberg's trouble providing empirical evidence for even a sixth stage, he emphasized that most of his conjecture towards a seventh stage was speculative.

Criticisms of Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development:

Does moral reasoning necessarily lead to moral behavior? Kohlberg's theory is concerned with moral thinking, but there is a big difference between knowing what we ought to do versus our actual actions. Social intuitionists argue that people often make moral judgments without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights and abstract ethical values. Given this, the arguments that Kohlberg and other rationalist psychologists have analyzed could be considered post hoc rationalizations of intuitive decisions. This would mean that moral reasoning is less relevant to moral action than Kohlberg's theory suggests.

Is justice the only aspect of moral reasoning we should consider? Critics have pointed out that Kohlberg's theory of moral development overemphasizes the concept as justice when making moral choices. Other factors such as compassion, caring, and other interpersonal feelings may play an important part in moral reasoning. Kohlberg’s theory has been perceived as androcentric by psychologists seeing justice as a ‘male’ value.

Does Kohlberg's theory overemphasize Western philosophy? Individualistic cultures emphasize personal rights while collectivistic cultures stress the importance of society and community. Eastern cultures may have different moral outlooks that Kohlberg's theory does not account for.

I godina i I grupa II godine - tekst sa prethodnog predavanja

'All I wanted was children'

Following the premature birth of her IVF octuplets, Nadya Suleman faces a backlash over her increasingly peculiar approach to motherhood

Nadya Suleman inhabits a world where the entitlement society and victim mentality merge. The mother of 14, a brood that more than doubled when she stunned the world and gave birth to octuplets 13 days ago, was so resentful at being raised an only child that she embarked on a single-minded mission to produce as many offspring as possible.
And she has made it clear she believes it was her right to deploy science and a large stash of embryos to pursue that obsession – despite her status as a single mother with no regular source of income, the reported opposition of the sperm donor, and the disapproval of her own parents, who are sharing the burden of bringing up the family.
With her eight tiny newborns still in hospital in Los Angeles, Miss Suleman offered a telling insight into her own psyche – part pitying "poor me", part defiant "why shouldn't I?" – in an unpaid interview with NBC.
Publicists are also seeking to sell her story, but initial predictions that a deal might raise $2 million towards her child-care bills now appear greatly exaggerated after the public mood turned against her. Early suggestions that she could also find work as a television child-rearing guru appear even more remote.
The saga of the "octo-mom" has gripped the country and her first comments were eagerly awaited. They came on Friday when the 33-year-old former psychiatric assistant was asked by NBC interviewer Ann Curry whether, with six children already, she might have opted to have only one or two embryos implanted.
"Of course not," replied Miss Suleman, with a mixture of disbelief and scorn for the suggestion. "I wanted them all transferred. Those are my children, and that's what was available and I used them."
So Miss Suleman took what was "available" and "used" them all, even if she was only hoping for just one more girl, as she insists. She had six embryos implanted by an unnamed doctor, but they apparently split into eight in the womb after the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and she declined selective abortion.
The birth of healthy octuplets, nine weeks' premature, was initially welcomed as a heartening medical miracle in a country ground down by the daily barrage of bad economic news.
But as it emerged that Miss Suleman was a single divorcée and already had six children aged between two and seven, all the product of IVF by the same doctor, even the tolerance of her famously liberal home state was tested to its limits.
In tandem with the deepening public backlash, a heated ethical debate is also swirling about the actions of the unidentified specialist, who was reported on Friday to be under investigation by the California Medical Board. There are no laws restricting the number of embryos that can be implanted, but guidelines say the maximum for a healthy woman under 35 should be two.
As the IVF will not have been covered by health insurance, the doctor may have been paid from the $170,000 in disability payments for back injuries Miss Suleman sustained in a 1999 riot at the psychiatric facility where she worked.
On NBC, Miss Suleman portrayed herself as a victim – of prejudice for choosing an "unconventional kind of life" as a single mother; and of the "isolation" of growing up in a "dysfunctional family".
Yet the picture that emerged last week, from her own words, her mother's comments and her medical records, points to a young woman raised in a typical middle-class immigrant American family, the daughter of an Iraqi linguist and a mother from Lithuanian stock who worked as a teacher.
What is in no doubt is the former cheerleader's single-minded determination to have as many children as she could. She began trying in her late teens and had the first of three miscarriages in 1995.
A year later, she married Marcos Gutierrez, a produce manager who has made no comment on the controversy, but the couple separated in 2000.
After suffering the serious back injury during the 1999 riot, she confided to a psychiatrist who was treating her that her inability to become pregnant was making her deeply depressed and had prompted suicidal thoughts.
In 2001, she finally gave birth to a child conceived using IVF with sperm donated by a friend. Over the next five years, she had another five children, including twins, via the same IVF donor.
With her mother Angela helping to look after the six grandchildren in the modest three-bedroom house they all shared in the LA suburb of Whittier, Miss Suleman returned to college, obtaining a degree in child development and then pursuing a master's in counselling.
But Miss Suleman's aspiration for a huge family was not over. Despite the sperm donor and her parents urging her to stop, she returned to her tame fertility specialist, as she wanted "just one more girl". By the time she turned up three months pregnant at the city's Kaiser Permanente medical centre (which is not the clinic where she was implanted), doctors thought she was pregnant with seven babies. But on Jan 26, there was another surprise – she gave birth to eight.
Such large multiple births have always attracted publicity. What is so unusual about this case is the level of opprobrium. Los Angeles' top-rated radio host, Bill Handel, decried the births as "freakish" and said his audience was "ready to boycott" firms that sent gifts to Miss Suleman and her babies.
Hollywood publicist David Brokaw, an expert in "crisis management" for high-profile clients, said Miss Suleman's newly hired PR firm was dealing with a "calamity". He added: "I don't see, the way this is shaped, how you can say much about it in terms of something favourable."
Sadly for Miss Suleman, her hastily hired publicist's prediction – that the public would change their opinion of her "for the good" once she broke her silence – has not come to pass. Indeed, her words seem to have fanned the flames.
A quick scan of responses to stories posted on an LA website shows its readers to be an unsympathetic bunch. Among the more polite, "Mowry" simply branded her a "total wacko". Another outraged California resident has even started an online "Freedom from Welfare" petition, aimed at "informing our government of our displeasure at the spending of our hard-earned tax dollars" on an "unmarried, unemployed female" whose family will be a "huge burden on the state of California".
Miss Suleman's parents, who married in Las Vegas in 1974 and divorced in 1999, have put aside their differences to help their only child raise her burgeoning brood. Her mother, Angela, is now retired and spends much of her time looking after the six older children. Her Iraqi-born father, Edward, plans to return to his homeland to work as a translator to provide financial assistance to his daughter.
Miss Suleman is well-spoken and coherent, certainly not the sort of "trailer trash" who occupy the more lurid daytime chat shows. Yet this weekend her words were being dissected for evidence of her mental state, rather than celebrated for the happy news they convey.
And she even managed a dig at some other parents, suggesting that she would be a better mother than many.
"I'm providing myself to my children," she said. "I'm loving them unconditionally… Everything I do, I'll stop my life for them and be present with them and hold them and be with them. And how many parents do that? I'm sure there are many that do, but many don't, and that's unfortunate and that is selfish."
Her long-suffering mother has made clear her frustration with her daughter's family-rearing decisions in a series of exasperated comments since the birth. She observed despairingly that she wished Nadya had become a kindergarten teacher if she wanted to be surrounded by children and even felt the need to insist that her daughter was not "evil", just "obsessed".
Miss Suleman, who cradles each baby for 45 minutes a day before they have to be placed back in units helping them breathe, makes no apologies for that obsession. "Sometimes we have that dream and that passion and we take risks," she told NBC. "All I wanted was children. I wanted to be a mom. That's all I ever wanted in my life. I love my children."

Tekst za iduće predavanje I grupe II godine

The students are asked to read the text and identify the key issues.

What’s Wrong With Cinderella?


By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
Published: December 24, 2006


I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.Skip to next paragraph
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”
She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.
“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”
My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”
•
Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.
Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.
When my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom — something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me — I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?
On the other hand, maybe I’m still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can “have it all.” Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what’s wrong with that?
•
The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive, playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for core products (say, Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of new media. What’s more, Disney films like “A Bug’s Life” in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities — what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?
It was about a month after Mooney’s arrival that the magic struck. That’s when he flew to Phoenix to check out his first “Disney on Ice” show. “Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses,” he told me last summer in his palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking in a rolling Scottish burr. “They weren’t even Disney products. They were generic princess products they’d appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, ‘O.K., let’s establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they’re doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.’ ”
Mooney picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film’s release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual “mythologies,” the princesses never make eye contact when they’re grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others’ presence.
It is also worth noting that not all of the ladies are of royal extraction. Part of the genius of “Princess” is that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally a Princess, though her reign didn’t last. “We’d always debate over whether she was really a part of the Princess mythology,” Mooney recalled. “She really wasn’t.” Likewise, Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on Princess merchandise, though for a different reason. Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu, which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her liberated warrior’s gear.)
The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores. “We simply gave girls what they wanted,” Mooney said of the line’s success, “although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It’s a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then you have a very healthy business.”
Every reporter Mooney talks to asks some version of my next question: Aren’t the Princesses, who are interested only in clothes, jewelry and cadging the handsome prince, somewhat retrograde role models?
“Look,” he said, “I have friends whose son went through the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over what they must’ve done wrong. Then they talked to other parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be.”
•
At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she shouted.
“Um, yeah,” I said, trying not to meet the other mother’s hostile gaze.
“Don’t you like her blue dress, Mama?”
I had to admit, I did.
She thought about this. “Then don’t you like her face?”
“Her face is all right,” I said, noncommittally, though I’m not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”
Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times, as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks — all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart — as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?
According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers. What better way to assure that they’ll always remain themselves? If that’s the case, score one for Mooney. By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.
“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”
It’s hard to imagine that girls’ options could truly be shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a stroll through a children’s store lately? At Toys “R” Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens, shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance from the “Star Wars” figures, GeoTrax and tool chests. The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it’s easier this way.
Easier, that is, unless you want to buy your daughter something that isn’t pink. Girls’ obsession with that color may seem like something they’re born with, like the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it ain’t so. When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)
The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through “Ally McBeal,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female.
A few days later, I picked my daughter up from preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on her head. “Look, Mommy, I’m Ariel!” she crowed, referring to Disney’s Little Mermaid. Then she stopped and furrowed her brow. “Mommy, do you like Ariel?”
I considered her for a moment. Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never really know. In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female. Maybe the best I can hope for is that her generation will get a little further with the solutions than we did.
For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my daughter a hug.
She smiled happily. “But, Mommy?” she added. “When I grow up, I’m still going to be a fireman.”