Afternoon Brief, April 29th

Labor Department Sets Sweeping New H-2A Foreign Guestworker Rule: The U.S. Department of Labor has adopted a new rule it said will protect foreign seasonal farmworkers from being abused, imposing sweeping regulations the head of an agricultural employers association called "offensive."...

In last week’s blog post we talked about showing human faces in ads. A second, albeit related, scientific fact is that people respond to emotional arguments in advertising over rational ones. A recent analysis of 1400 advertising case studies in the US showed that those with emotional content performed twice as well as those with only rational content. Why is that? It’s because people feel first before they think. A Portuguese-American neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California named António Damásio wrote a book in 1994 about this called Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. The book centers on the physiology of rational thought and decision and how these faculties could have evolved through Darwinian natural selection. In the book, he chronicles time spent studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions are generated and processed. Interest