Time course of attentional modulations on automatic emotional processing

In a previous study using event-related potentials (ERPs) [S. Doallo, S. Rodríguez Holguín, F. Cadaveira, Attentional load affects automatic emotional processing: evidence from event-related potentials, Neuroreport 17 (2006) 1797–1801], we reported that differential responses to unattended peripheral affective pictures, as reflected by N1-P2 modulations at posterior regions, are modulated by attentional load at fixation. Here, new analyses of these data were performed to evaluate whether a sustained, broadly distributed, negative shift in the unattended pictures ERP waveforms, which displayed larger amplitudes for emotional stimuli, reflects an additional differential response to the emotional content. Under low-load conditions, unpleasant (versus neutral) pictures elicited greater negativities in the 80–140 ms latency range over frontocentral sites and more centroparietally distributed from 200 to 280 ms. These findings provide further evidence of the time course of emotional processing at unattended locations and its modulation by attentional load.