Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias.

Characterisation of synoptic conditions and cyclones associated with top ranking potential wind loss events over Iberia

Intense extra-tropical cyclones are often associated with strong winds, heavy precipitation and socio-economic impacts. Over southwestern Europe, such storms occur less often, but still cause high economic losses. We characterise the largescale atmospheric conditions and cyclone tracks during the top-100 potential losses over Iberia associated with wind events. Based on 65 years of reanalysis data,events are classified into four groups: (i) cyclone tracks crossing over Iberia on the event day (“Iberia”), (ii) cyclones crossing further north, typically southwest of the British Isles (“North”), (iii) cyclones crossing southwest to northeast near the northwest tip of Iberia (“West”), and (iv) so called “Hybrids”, characterised by a strong pressure gradient over Iberia due to the juxtaposition of low and high pressure centres. Generally, “Iberia” events are the most frequent (31% to 45% for top-100 vs.top-20), while “West” events are rare (10% to 12%). 70% of the events were primarily associated with a cyclone. Multi-decadal variability in the number of events is identified. While the peak in recent years is quite prominent, other comparably stormy periods occurred in the 1960s and 1980s. This study documents that damaging wind storms over Iberia are not rare events, and their frequency of occurrence undergoes strong multi-decadal variability.