The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History

The Long Exception examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the interregnum between Gilded Ages. The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Rise of QAnon: A Mental Model of Good and Evil Stews in an Echochamber

The QAnon conspiracy posits that Satan-worshiping Democrats operate a covert child sex-trafficking operation, which Donald Trump is destined to expose and annihilate. Emblematic of the ease with which political misconceptions can spread through social media, QAnon originated in late 2017 and rapidly grew to shape the political beliefs of millions. To illuminate the process by which a conspiracy theory spreads, we report two computational studies examining the social network structure and semantic content of tweets produced by users central to the early QAnon network on Twitter. Using data mined in the summer of 2018, we examined over 800,000 tweets about QAnon made by about 100,000 users. The majority of users disseminated rather than produced information, serving to create an online echochamber. Users appeared to hold a simplistic mental model in which political events are viewed as a struggle between antithetical forces—both observed and unobserved—of Good and Evil

Dynamic emotional states shape the episodic structure of memory.

Human emotions fluctuate over time. However, it is unclear how these shifting emotional states influence the organization of episodic memory. Here, we examine how emotion dynamics transform experiences into memorable events. Using custom musical pieces and a dynamic emotion-tracking tool to elicit and measure temporal fluctuations in felt valence and arousal, our results demonstrate that memory is organized around emotional states. While listening to music, fluctuations between different emotional valences bias temporal encoding process toward memory integration or separation. Whereas a large absolute or negative shift in valence helps segment memories into episodes, a positive emotional shift binds sequential representations together. Both discrete and dynamic shifts in music-evoked valence and arousal also enhance delayed item and temporal source memory for concurrent neutral items, signaling the beginning of new emotional events. These findings are in line with the idea that the rise and fall of emotions can sculpt unfolding experiences into memories of meaningful events

Emotional arousal lingers in time to bind discrete episodes in memory

Temporal stability and change in neutral contexts can transform continuous experiences into distinct and memorable events. However, less is known about how shifting emotional states influence these memory processes, despite ample evidence that emotion impacts non-temporal aspects of memory. Here, we examined if emotional stimuli influence temporal memory for recent event sequences. Participants encoded lists of neutral images while listening to auditory tones. At regular intervals within each list, participants heard emotional positive, negative, or neutral sounds, which served as “emotional event boundaries” that divided each sequence into discrete events. Temporal order memory was tested for neutral item pairs that either spanned an emotional sound or were encountered within the same auditory event. Encountering a highly arousing event boundary led to faster response times for items encoded within the next event. Critically, we found that highly arousing sounds had different effects on binding ongoing versus ensuing sequential representations in memory. Specifically, highly arousing sounds were significantly more likely to enhance temporal order memory for ensuing information compared to information that spanned those boundaries, especially for boundaries with negative valence. These findings suggest that within aversive emotional contexts, fluctuations in arousal help shape the temporal organisation of events in memory.</p

CC-ALLEX: Counterconditioning and contextual renewal in a Web-based causal learning task

Counter Conditioning Allergy Extinction (CC-ALLEX) project from Dunsmoor la

The features that shape fear: how emotional intensity and threat relevance interact to guide fear generalization

The amount of fear of a potential threat is oftentimes proportional to the overlap in shared features with a known threat. An adaptive threat learning system should therefore extract the most relevant feature of a known threat to help successfully detect and appropriately respond to potential threats in the future. But what if the most salient feature of a known threat is emotionally positive? Here, we asked whether fear generalization can be guided be positive emotional features. We first paired a slightly happy (Experiment 1) or fearful (Experiment 2) face with an electrical shock. We then tested fear generalization to modified face stimuli of the same identity exhibiting more or less happiness or fear expression. Both experiments yielded biased physiological arousal to a face stimulus with the most exaggerated emotional expression. These findings suggest that overlap of positive emotional features extracted from a known threat can guide biased fear generalization