An investigation into the relationship between visual imagery and stress

Visual imagery plays a functional role in memory and emotion processing. Similar links between stress, memory and emotion also exist, leading to the proposed hypothesis that there may also be a functional relationship between stress and visual imagery. In 36 students, trait vividness of visual imagery was assessed in relation to two variables: trait stress reactivity and acute stress response. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and a matched control condition were used to induce stress. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionaire (VVIQ) and Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale (PSRS) were used as trait measures of visual imagery vividness and stress reactivity respectively. Neither the relationship between vividness of visual imagery and stress reactivity or acute stress response were significant. These findings suggest that stress and visual imagery may not be as closely related as thought. However, significant gender differences seen in the sample and proposed in the literature led to exploratory analyses. These analyses revealed a significant effect of stress-reactive group (high/low) on visual imagery in women, such that low stress reactive individuals experienced more vivid visual imagery and vice versa. Additionally, in women only, the hypothesised inverse relationships: between visual imagery vividness and both trait and acute stress were found to have moderate and strong correlations that were approaching significance, respectively. Given that this was post-hoc analysis, firm conclusions cannot be drawn, although this suggests that the proposed inverse relationship between voluntary visual imagery and stress may exist in women in the healthy population

In situ observations of the Swiss periglacial environment using GNSS instruments

Monitoring of the periglacial environment is relevant for many disciplines including glaciology, natural hazard management, geomorphology, and geodesy. Since October 2022, Rock Glacier Velocity (RGV) is a new Essential Climate Variable (ECV) product within the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). However, geodetic surveys at high elevation remain very challenging due to environmental and logistical reasons. During the past decades, the introduction of low-cost global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technologies has allowed us to increase the accuracy and frequency of the observations. Today, permanent GNSS instruments enable continuous surface displacement observations at millimetre accuracy with a sub-daily resolution. In this paper, we describe decennial time series of GNSS observables as well as accompanying meteorological data. The observations comprise 54 positions located on different periglacial landforms (rock glaciers, landslides, and steep rock walls) at altitudes ranging from 2304 to 4003 ma.s.l. and spread across the Swiss Alps. The primary data products consist of raw GNSS observables in RINEX format, inclinometers, and weather station data. Additionally, cleaned and aggregated time series of the primary data products are provided, including daily GNSS positions derived through two independent processing tool chains. The observations documented here extend beyond the dataset presented in the paper and are currently continued with the intention of long-term monitoring. An annual update of the dataset, available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.948334 (Beutel et al., 2022),​​​​​​​ is planned. With its future continuation, the dataset holds potential for advancing fundamental process understanding and for the development of applied methods in support of e.g. natural hazard management

Can understanding reward help illuminate anhedonia?

Purpose of review: The goal of this paper is to examine how reward processing might help us understand the symptom of anhedonia. Recent findings: There are extensive reviews exploring the relationship between responses to rewarding stimuli and depression. These often include a discussion on anhedonia and how this might be underpinned in particular by dysfunctional reward processing. However, there is no specific consensus on whether studies to date have adequately examined the various sub-components of reward processing or how these might relate in turn to various aspects of anhedonia symptoms. Summary: The approach to understanding the symptom of anhedonia should be to examine all the sub-components of reward processing at the subjective and objective behavioural and neural level, with well validated tasks that can be replicated. Investigating real life experiences of anhedonia and how theses might be predicted by objective lab measures is also needed in future research

A decade of detailed observations (2008-2018) in steep bedrock permafrost at the Matterhorn Hörnligrat (Zermatt, CH)

The PermaSense project is an ongoing interdisciplinary effort between geo-science and engineering disciplines and started in 2006 with the goals of realizing observations that previously have not been possible. Specifically, the aims are to obtain measurements in unprecedented quantity and quality based on technological advances. This paper describes a unique >10-year data record obtained from in situ measurements in steep bedrock permafrost in an Alpine environment on the Matterhorn Hörnligrat, Zermatt, Switzerland, at 3500ma:s:l. Through the utilization of state-of-the-art wireless sensor technology it was possible to obtain more data of higher quality, make these data available in near real time and tightly monitor and control the running experiments. This data set (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.897640,Weber et al., 2019a) constitutes the longest, densest and most diverse data record in the history of mountain permafrost research worldwide with 17 different sensor types used at 29 distinct sensor locations consisting of over 114.5 million data points captured over a period of 10 or more years. By documenting and sharing these data in this form we contribute to making our past research reproducible and facilitate future research based on these data, e.g., in the areas of analysis methodology, comparative studies, assessment of change in the environment, natural hazard warning and the development of process models. Finally, the cross-validation of four different data types clearly indicates the dominance of thawing-related kinematics

Racial differences in systemic sclerosis disease presentation: a European Scleroderma Trials and Research group study

Objectives. Racial factors play a significant role in SSc. We evaluated differences in SSc presentations between white patients (WP), Asian patients (AP) and black patients (BP) and analysed the effects of geographical locations.Methods. SSc characteristics of patients from the EUSTAR cohort were cross-sectionally compared across racial groups using survival and multiple logistic regression analyses.Results. The study included 9162 WP, 341 AP and 181 BP. AP developed the first non-RP feature faster than WP but slower than BP. AP were less frequently anti-centromere (ACA; odds ratio (OR) = 0.4, P < 0.001) and more frequently anti-topoisomerase-I autoantibodies (ATA) positive (OR = 1.2, P = 0.068), while BP were less likely to be ACA and ATA positive than were WP [OR(ACA) = 0.3, P < 0.001; OR(ATA) = 0.5, P = 0.020]. AP had less often (OR = 0.7, P = 0.06) and BP more often (OR = 2.7, P < 0.001) diffuse skin involvement than had WP.AP and BP were more likely to have pulmonary hypertension [OR(AP) = 2.6, P < 0.001; OR(BP) = 2.7, P = 0.03 vs WP] and a reduced forced vital capacity [OR(AP) = 2.5, P < 0.001; OR(BP) = 2.4, P < 0.004] than were WP. AP more often had an impaired diffusing capacity of the lung than had BP and WP [OR(AP vs BP) = 1.9, P = 0.038; OR(AP vs WP) = 2.4, P < 0.001]. After RP onset, AP and BP had a higher hazard to die than had WP [hazard ratio (HR) (AP) = 1.6, P = 0.011; HR(BP) = 2.1, P < 0.001].Conclusion. Compared with WP, and mostly independent of geographical location, AP have a faster and earlier disease onset with high prevalences of ATA, pulmonary hypertension and forced vital capacity impairment and higher mortality. BP had the fastest disease onset, a high prevalence of diffuse skin involvement and nominally the highest mortality

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe