Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
The history of the Bracero Program (1942–64), a bilateral US-Mexico labor migration agreement, reveals the influence of earlier European bilateral labor agreements.
The Bracero Program (1942–64), a bilateral agreement to regulate labor migration between the United States and Mexico, oversaw more than four million contracts enabling Mexican men to work “temporarily” in the United States. Historians of the Mexico-US borderlands and of global migration have interpreted the program through hemispheric as well as broader imperial lenses. Yet this article shows that the program’s foundational ideas emerged from two decades of transatlantic exchange and circulation that cannot be contained within a single continent, nor a single framework such as imperialism. During the interwar period, Mexican politicians, intellectuals, and migrant labor activists eagerly participated in transatlantic and inter-American dialogues about migration policy, compared themselves to Italy, and admired the bilateral labor migration agreements that had recently emerged in Europe. Meanwhile, US officials heard but resisted pleas from migration scholars and the International Labor Organization to emulate European receiving countries. The two parties’ differing engagements with European migration policies meant that when World War II pushed US officials to suddenly propose the agreement, Mexican actors’ transatlantic knowledge inspired their participation and crucially shaped the program’s design. This article thus pushes historians of migration policy towards studies of not just comparison but also entanglement.
Findings from a randomized controlled trial indicate that bright light therapy reduces the symptoms of depression by increasing the connectivity between the midbrain and the frontal cortex.
The underlying mechanisms of bright light therapy (BLT) in the prevention of individuals with subthreshold depression symptoms are yet to be elucidated. The goal of the study was to assess the correlation between midbrain monoamine-producing nuclei treatment-related functional connectivity (FC) changes and depressive symptom improvements in subthreshold depression. This double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was conducted between March 2020 and June 2022. A total of 74 young adults with subthreshold depression were randomly assigned to receive 8-week BLT (N = 38) or placebo (N = 36). Depression severity was measured using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS). The participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging at baseline and after treatment. The dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN), ventral tegmental area (VTA), and habenula seed-based whole-brain FC were analyzed. A multivariate regression model examined whether baseline brain FC was associated with changes in scores on HDRS during BLT treatment. BLT group displayed significantly decreased HDRS scores from pre- to posttreatment compared to the placebo group. BLT increased the FC between the DRN and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and between the left VTA and right superior frontal gyrus (SFG). Altered VTA–SFG connectivity was associated with HDRS changes in the BLT group. Moreover, the baseline FC between DRN and mPFC could predict HDRS changes in BLT. These results suggested that BLT improves depressive symptoms and increases midbrain monoamine-producing nuclei and frontal cortex connectivity in subthreshold depression, which raises the possibility that pretreatment FC of DRN–mPFC could be used as a biomarker for improved BLT treatment in depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)