Attentional orienting towards emotion: P2 and N400 ERP effects

► Attention can be oriented to the emotional status of a word stimulus. ► Emotional orienting yields faster responses to validly cued words. ► Emotional and semantic orienting modulate N400 responses to word stimuli. ► Emotional orienting additionally modulates the earlier P200 potential. ► This adaptive mechanism ensures rapid processing of emotional stimuli.