Thursday, March 26, 2020

Are These Not Also Men Essays - Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas

Are These Not Also Men? Are These Not Also Men? In 1511, Fray Antonio Montesinos spoke the words, Are these not also men? His famous quote was a response to the mistreatment of the indigenous peoples that inhabited the Americas, by the conquering Spanish. Immediately upon discovering and colonizing the New World a widespread debate arose in regards to the usage and treatment of the native Indians. This debate was primarily focused on how to classify the Indians. Many people believed that the Indians were not human at all and should be allowed to be treated merely as slaves. The opposing side, the church, argued back that the Indians, no matter how seemingly uncivilized they lived, were humans. A major argument resulted and the question as to how a human being is classified as being a human became a fiery debate among many. The Spanish conquerors believed that, like animals, the Indians did not have rational souls, or the ability to reason. Also, in conjunction, the Conquerors used the views of a medieval Dominican named Thomas Aquinas as justification for their reasoning. Aquinas once stated that a rational soul was determined by the ability to become a Christian. Those not capable were considered to be brute animals. The Indians were often compared to parrots, or horses in the way they lived their lives. The conquerors needed the indigenous people to be considered less than human because if they were considered animals, forms of forced labor with out time off for religious learning could be used. An example was the encomienda. The Churchs point of view was that in order to have and maintain power in the New World they would need the numbers of the Indians to be included in their community as followers. Patricia Seed, the author of this journal offers her line of thinking. It is that both sides of the debate were trying to monopolize the Indians for their own benefits. The Spaniards, to become more prosperous themselves and the Church, to strengthen there own political base in the New World. She argues that neither side was fully justified and underhanded motives had much to do with each sides actions. (Seed, 640) The church, in an attempt to end the debate, sought the opinion of the pope himself and in 1537 Pope Paul III issued an official statement regarding the Indians. We....consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are...capable of understanding the catholic faith. The Spanish Crown, agreed with the Popes statement. Queen Isabella used this to Spains advantage when she declared that all the indigenous peoples conquered in Spanish territory were subjects to Spain. Seed suggests that this formed the keystone to Spains political control of the natives.(Seed 645) This new system had two main goals. The first was to further spread Christianity by converting the Indians and teaching the ways of Christianity. The second was vassalage, forced duty of obedience to the Spanish State. In all the debates and controversy to whether or not the Indians were humans who were capable of grasping the fundamentals of Christianity, a major point was overlooked. This was the idea that maybe the Indians were in fact capable of becoming Christians, but really didnt have any desire to. Automatically, if an Indian didnt show signs of grasping the ideas of our religion, they were thought of as stupid and in many cases not even human. No one ever really stopped to think of the possibility that they were content with their own beliefs and didnt want to have a strange and foreign idea forced upon them. In response to this journal, I agree with Seeds argument, in that, although both sides had their opinions, neither side was justified in their arguments. This is true because both sides were only looking at the situation form their own point of view, and never considered the thoughts of the Indians. Still today, there is much controversy as to the rights of the few indigenous cultures that still exist today. The social and political problems that existed hundreds of years ago still exist today and never will be truly fixed until we, as an entire society, decide to let others live as they

Friday, March 6, 2020

An Investigation Of How Mood Affects Theory-Of-Mind Use In Pre-School Children The WritePass Journal

An Investigation Of How Mood Affects Theory-Of-Mind Use In Pre-School Children Background An Investigation Of How Mood Affects Theory-Of-Mind Use In Pre-School Children BackgroundProposed ResearchProcedure. Mood Induction. False-Belief Task. PredictionsReferences Related Background â€Å"Theory of mind† (ToM) is the ability to reason other people’s beliefs, intentions and desires (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). Over the last two decades, there has been considerable developmental research into ToM using the â€Å"false-belief task† (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1985, Wellman et al., 2001). The majority of research has established that ToM is present in young children and develops in a predictable sequence through childhood (Wellman Liu, 2004). For example, by three years of age, children can understand that two individuals can hold different beliefs (Wimmer Perner, 1983) and by age four, can understand that people can have â€Å"false-beliefs† contrary to reality (Wellman Liu, 2004). Recent research has even demonstrated that adults have difficulties with false-belief tasks (Birch Bloom, 2007). However, a recent paper by Converse et al (2008) examined the role of incidental mood on ToM. Grounded in the view that ToM requires effortful and deliberative processing (Kahneman, 2003), researchers found that when distinguishing between one’s own and other’s beliefs, participants were facilitated by sad moods compared to happy moods. This is because happiness is associated with heuristic processing whilst sadness is associated with systematic and deliberative processing (Converse et al., 2008). In their study, adult participants underwent a musical mood induction procedure (MMIP) and were randomly allocated to two conditions (â€Å"happy† and â€Å"sad†). Those in the former condition were asked to listen to a song from a pre-selected list of happy songs whilst participants in the latter condition were required to listen to a sad song. Following the mood induction, participants completed a false-belief task in which they read one of two versions of a sc enario and estimate a character’s behaviour. Whilst the character has the same knowledge in both versions, participants received different information. Researchers then measured low ToM use by observing whether participants had an increased reliance on their own private knowledge. The study is an important contribution to the current body of knowledge on ToM as the findings suggest that a) mood states do have important consequences for mental-state inferences and b) variability in ToM studies may be explained by mood. However, despite these contributions, the study solely focused on a sample of adults and failed to explore how mood affects ToM use in children. This is an important oversight given that the majority of developments in ToM have been based on studies with children, therefore, suggesting significant implications for research if mood is found to significantly impact children’s ToM judgments. Moreover, given children’s increased susceptibility to mood induction (De Haan Gunnar, 2009), mood may have even more potent effects on ToM in children. This current study will therefore examine the role of mood in affecting ToM use in children for the first time. It will attempt to bolster previous findings that mood does influence ToM and clarify the role of mood in influencing deliberative processing in ToM. In so doing, the study will replicate the original procedure, but with modifications to the mood induction and the false-belief task. In fact, a clear strength of this study is that the false-belief task was originally devised to be used with children and not adults (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), making the task particularly suitable for use with children. In addition, previous research has supported the fact that mood induction procedures can effectively impact children’s positive and negative emotions (Brenner, 2000). Proposed Research There are modifications made to the experimental procedure. As mood induction requires participants to follow explicit instructions, changes to the MMIP will be implemented according to the study’s sample of pre-school children. For example, although researchers (e.g. Dalla Bella et al., 2001) have found that most 5 year olds can distinguish positive and negative valence in music, a MMIP may not be sufficient for invoking moods in children. Children will therefore undergo an additional mood induction. Moreover, in the original study, adult participants completed a pre- and post- induction self-report (Positive-and-Negative Affect Schedule; Watson Clark, 1994) to serve as a manipulation check. However, as a self-report is difficult to implement with young children, an alternative manipulation check is needed. There are also important ethical considerations associated with a MMIP in children. The experimenter will need to ensure that mood induction does not cause long-term effe cts, but is also not too short-lived to observe its effects. Method Participants 100 children aged 4-6 years old will be recruited from local schools through flyers and e-mail bulletins. Procedure. On the day of testing, each child will be guided to an individual room. To provide a replication of the Converse et al (2008) study, a 2 X 2 between-subjects experimental design will include a mood induction and false-belief task. Researchers will randomly allocate children to 2 conditions: â€Å"happy† and â€Å"sad† and undergo the mood induction. Both groups then complete the same false-belief task. The entire procedure takes a total of 40 minutes. Mood Induction. The mood induction scenario for each condition will make amendments to the MMIP in the Converse et al (2008) study. Each child will first be shown a sheet of paper with a series of â€Å"smiley faces† ranging from very sad to very happy, and asked to point to the image that best describes how they feel. This is the baseline affect manipulation check. Children will then be instructed to listen to a song played via speakers. Children in the happy condition will listen to two songs from the original list of songs in the Converse et al (2008) study and children in the sad condition will listen to two sad songs. In both conditions, children will be explicitly told â€Å"Now, I am going to play a   â€Å"happy† / â€Å"sad† song so please listen carefully to the song†. Children will then be presented with a model figure on a sheet of paper and asked to draw a replica of the figure on a plain sheet of A4 paper. In the happy condition, children will be presented with a smiling figure and in the sad condition, children will be asked to copy a sad figure. Following this, children will be presented with the sheet of faces and asked to point to the face which describes how they feel to provide a post-task rating of affect. A second manipulation check will be the size of their drawing as research has suggested that drawing size is associated with a child’s affect. Larger drawings indicative of positive affect and smaller drawings are indicative of negative affect (Forrest Thomas, 1991). False-Belief Task. The false-belief task is the classic â€Å"Sally-Anne task† (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). Each child is seated at a table with two dolls. The experimenter tells the child that the dolls are named Anne and Sally and checks that the child has understood these names. Each doll is placed in front of a basket and square box. The experimenter then enacts a scene in which a marble is hidden in Sally’s basket to ‘hide’ the marble with Anne looking on. Sally then â€Å"leaves the room† and the marble is then re-hidden in the box. Sally returns and the experimenter prompts the child with three questions: ‘Where will Sally look for her marble?’ (â€Å"belief question†) ‘Where is the marble really?’ (â€Å"reality question†) ‘Where was the marble in the beginning?’ (â€Å"memory question†) Predictions There are a number of predictions for the current study. Firstly, it is expected that the findings of the original study will be replicated in the sample of pre-school children. That is, I expect that after controlling for age effects, children in the sad condition will score higher on the belief, reality and memory questions in the Sally-Anne task. This will be due to a greater deliberative processing associated with a sad mood. These findings will provide support for the idea that ToM requires deliberative processing and such processing is associated with sad moods rather than happy moods. Second, I expect that there will be a number of age differences in performance on the Sally-Anne task. I expect that younger children, due to their increased susceptibility to mood induction, will have a greatly diminished ToM on the Sally-Anne task due to the more pronounced impact of mood on their deliberative processing. However, it must be noted that it is possible that the results of the current study will not replicate the original study. This may be due to a number of factors. Firstly, it is possible that the mood induction procedures are not powerful enough to invoke happy and sad moods for children or they produce effects that are too short term to observe any effects in the false belief task. Second, it may be that the deliberative processing associated with sad moods and the heuristic processing associated with happy moods is not developed sufficiently in pre-school children, and is only salient in adulthood. If this is the case, this provides impetus for future research focused on testing the influence of mood on ToM in older children and adolescents. References Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a ‘‘theory of mind’’? Cognition, 21, 37–46. Birch, S. A. J., Bloom, P. (2007). The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs. Psychological Science, 18(5), 382–386. Brenner, E. (2000). Mood induction in children: Methodological implications. Review of General Psychology, 4, 264-283. Converse, B. A., Shuhong, L., Boaz, K., Epley, N. (2008). In the Mood To Get Over Yourself: Mood Affects Theory-of-Mind Use. Emotion, 8(5), 725-630. Dalla Bella, S., Peretz, I., Rousseau, L., Gosselin, N. (2001). A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music. Cognition, 80, B1-B10. de Haan, M., Gunnar, M.R. (2009). Handbook of Developmental Social Neuroscience. The Guilford Press. Forrest, M. Thomas, G.V. (1991). An exploratory study of drawings by bereaved children, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 30, 373-374. Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697–720. Watson, D., Clark, L. A. (1994). The PANAS-X: Manual for the positive and negative affect schedule-Expanded Form. Iowa City: University of Iowa. Wimmer, H.; Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young childrens understanding of deception. Cognition  13(1), 103–128. Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655–684. Wellman, H. M., Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of Theory-Of-Mind Tasks. Child Development, 75(2), 523-541.