An ongoing debate exists in the literature regarding the reliability of attention bias to threats. The current study directly examined how the interaction between available attention resources, personality traits, and stimuli visual characteristics moderates attention bias to task-irrelevant threatening stimuli. To this end, the current study conducted a comprehensive series of four experiments in which an emotional modification of the perceptual load task was employed. Participants with high and low fear of spiders, as well as participants diagnosed with arachnophobia, performed the task under high and low perceptual loads while ignoring task-irrelevant distracting spiders. As expected, all participants, regardless of fear level, were affected to some extent by the threatening distracting spider pictures, known to evoke threat due to their evolutionary value. However, the results show that high fear and phobia groups exhibit consistent attention bias to threats, depending on the threat’s ecological value. The low fear groups, on the other hand, showed a similar but weaker attention bias to threat, only when attentional resources were available.These results deomstratethe variance in individuals’ capacity to inhibit distracting threats and focus on current goals.

This research examines the impact of COVID-19 mobility restrictions and vaccinations on people's behavioural intentions to travel and their actual travel patterns. The study was conducted in Israel using three-wave cross-sectional analysis: June 2020 (n=129), November 2020 (n=211) and April 2021 (n=208). The findings reveal that the main factor supporting tourism is the desire to resume travel and not vaccination. The study also shows that domestic travel is not a substitute for international travel, at least in the case of Israel. Attitudes towards tourism are significant predictors of domestic and international travel intentions and of actual domestic travel. Nevertheless, the belief that tourism is a source of recovery is related only to intentions to travel internationally. Non-clinical depression symptoms are negatively correlated with domestic tourism. Variables previously considered relevant to resuming tourism, e.g. vaccination, economic stress and health risk factors, have little or no influence on future demand, while attitudes regarding tourism emerge as the most important factor.

This study aimed to define the psychological markers for future development of depression symptoms following the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. Based on previous studies, we focused on loneliness, intolerance of uncertainty and emotion estimation biases as potential predictors of elevated depression levels. During the general lockdown in April 2020, 551 participants reported their psychological health by means of various online questionnaires and an implicit task. Out of these participants, 129 took part in a second phase in June 2020. Subjective loneliness during the lockdown rather than objective isolation was the strongest predictor of symptoms of depression 5 weeks later. Younger age and health related worry also predicted higher non-clinical levels of depression and emotional distress. The results support the diathesis-stress model, which posits that a combination of preexisting vulnerabilities along with stressors such as negative life events are among the factors affecting the development of psychopathology. Moreover, our results correspond with those of previous studies conducted worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken together, these findings call for focusing on psychological factors, especially among younger people, to identify individuals at risk for future development of depression and to promote new strategies for prevention.