Aversive picture processing: Effects of a concurrent task on sustained defensive system engagement

Association between perception of harm and valence of shoulder movement images with disability levels related to chronic shoulder pain

ABSTRACT

Recent studies highlight an interplay between pain perception and emotional responses. This necessitates a thorough investigation into how beliefs and motivational influences respond to visual stimuli of movements. Such an analysis is crucial for understanding the extent to which these factors contribute to disability levels associated with shoulder pain. We aimed to investigate the relationship between the perception of harm and the valence in images depicting shoulder movements and determine how these perceptions are linked to disability levels associated with shoulder pain. This cross-sectional study recruited 42 individuals with chronic shoulder pain. Participants were presented with 58 shoulder movements images. Each participant evaluated these images for emotional valence and arousal using the self-assessment manikin. For every image, they provided their level of avoidance, fear, and perception of harm in a numerical scale. We measured disability levels and pain catastrophizing using the Shoulder Pain and Disability Index and the Pain Catastrophizing Scale. A direct acyclic graph was used. Multiple linear regression analysis was conducted with shoulder disability as the dependent variable and perception of harm and valence as independent variables, adjusted for the confounders catastrophizing and arousal. This analysis resulted in a significant model (F4,37 = 11.44; adjusted R2 = 0.547; P < 0.01). The perception of harm to shoulder movement (β = 0.11; P < 0.001; 95% confidence interval = 5.6-11.8) was significantly associated with the level of shoulder disability, whereas valence did not show a significant association (β = 0.26; P = 0.15; 95% confidence interval = 1.7-10.8). The perception of harm associated with shoulder movements images during daily activities was associated with disability. Individuals who believe that shoulder movements are harmful have greater disability.

The influence of self-focused attention on emotional picture processing: An ERP study

Research has documented neurophysiological indicators of anticipation (Stimulus Preceding Negativity [SPN]) and perception (Late Positive Potential [LPP]) of threat, yet little is known as to how self-focused attention manipulations influence emotion processing within the context of cued picture viewing. With self-referent attention moderating attention to external stimuli, it is necessary to document how self-focused attention impacts attention and the ability to emotionally process external threat. The goal of the present study was to evaluate the impact of self-focused attention on the anticipation and perceptual processing of unpleasant pictures within a cued-picture viewing paradigm among 33 participants. Overall, the results suggest that the self-focused attention manipulations disrupted anticipation but not processing of pictures, as indexed by the SPN and LPP respectively. Self-focused attention appears to disrupt the preparatory attention for upcoming unpleasant stimuli, potentially through loading cognitive resources or activation of associative defensive responding. Collectively, these findings demonstrate the impact of self-focused attention within the context of emotional picture processing and suggest further areas of investigation.

Implicit Negativity Bias Leads to Greater Loss Aversion and Learning during Decision-Making

It is widely accepted there is the existence of negativity bias, a greater sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli compared with positive ones, but its effect on decision-making would depend on the context. In risky decisions, negativity bias could lead to non-rational choices by increasing loss aversion; yet in ambiguous decisions, it could favor reinforcement-learning and better decisions by increasing sensitivity to punishments. Nevertheless, these hypotheses have not been tested to date. Our aim was to fill this gap. Sixty-nine participants rated ambiguous emotional faces (from the NimStim set) as positive or negative to assess negativity bias. The implicit level of the bias was also obtained by tracking the mouse's trajectories when rating faces. Then, they performed both a risky and an ambiguous decision-making task. Participants displayed negativity bias, but only at the implicit level. In addition, this bias was associated with loss aversion in risky decisions, and with greater performance through the ambiguous decisional task. These results highlight the need to contextualize biases, rather than draw general conclusions about whether they are inherently good or bad.

Unpredictable fearful stimuli disrupt timing activities: Evidence from event-related potentials

The present study investigated the effect of an imminent fearful stimulus on an ongoing temporal task. Participants judged the duration of a blank temporal interval followed by a fearful or a neutral image. Results showed an underestimation of the duration in the fearful condition relative to the neutral condition, but only when the occurrence of the fearful image was difficult to predict. ERPs results for the blank temporal interval found no effect of the fearful stimulus on the contingent negative variation (CNV) amplitude in the clock stage. However, after the image onset, there was a larger P1 for the fearful relative to the neutral condition. Although this effect was indistinguishable regardless of whether the fearful event could be easily predicted, a late positive potential (LPP) component displayed larger amplitude only for unpredictable fearful stimuli. The time-frequency results showed enhanced delta-theta power (0.5-7.5 Hz) for the unpredictable fearful stimuli in the late stage. Importantly, the enhanced delta-theta rhythm correlated negatively with the duration judgments. Together, these results suggest that an unpredictable fearful event might divert more attention away from the counting process in the working memory stage, resulting in missing ticks and temporal underestimation.

Neural mechanisms and predictors of SSRI and CBT treatment of anxiety: A randomized trial focused on emotion and cognitive processing

Anxiety disorders (ADs) are common and difficult to treat. While research suggests ADs are characterized by an imbalance between bottom-up and top-down attention processes and that effective treatments work by correcting this dysfunction, there is insufficient data to explain how and for whom treatments work. The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential reflecting elaborative processing of motivationally salient stimuli, is sensitive to both bottom-up and top-down processes. The present study examines the LPP in healthy controls (HC) and patients with ADs under low and high working memory (WM) load to assess its utility as a predictor and index of symptom reduction in patients who underwent cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment. The LPP when viewing negative and neutral distractor images and WM performance were assessed in 96 participants (40 HC, 32 CBT, 24 SSRI) during a letter recall task at Week 0 and in a subset of the study sample (23 CBT, 16 SSRI) at Week 12. Patients were randomly assigned to twelve weeks of CBT or SSRI treatment. Participants completed self-reported symptom measures at each time point. Greater Week 0 LPP to negative images under low WM load predicted greater symptom reduction in the SSRI, but not the CBT, group. Regression analyses examining the LPP to negative images as an index of symptom reduction revealed a smaller decrease in the LPP to negative images under low WM load was associated with less anxiety reduction across treatment modalities. Findings suggest the LPP during low WM load may serve as a cost-effective predictor and index of treatment outcome in ADs. Clinical Trials Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov (Identifier: NCT01903447).

Abnormalities in emotional and motor reactions among young prehypertensive individuals: employing continuous blood pressure analysis

Background:

Essential hypertension is an important risk factor for cerebrovascular diseases and a major cause of premature death in industrialized societies. A predisposing factor for essential hypertension is prehypertension: blood pressure (BP) values at rest that are at the higher end of the normal range. Abnormally enhanced cardiovascular responses to motor and emotional tasks have been found as predictors of essential hypertension. Yet, knowledge regarding the BP reaction to aversive stimuli and motor reaction in prehypertension is limited.

Methods:

We compared the reaction to aversive and neutral stimuli inducing an emotional response (experiment 1) and to the isometric handgrip exercise (IHE) inducing a motor response (experiment 2), between prehypertensive and normotensive controls. BP reactions were measured and analyzed in a continuous fashion, in contrast to previous studies that averaged BP responses across blocks. We applied a multilevel B-spline model, a continuous analysis that enabled a better understanding of the BP time course and the detection of subtle differences between groups.

Results:

In both tasks, we found that prehypertensive individuals showed enhanced DBP reactions compared with normotensive controls; prehypertensive individuals exhibited lower BP responses to aversive pictures and higher BP responses to the IHE. These results are in line with previous studies with healthy or hypertensive participants and suggest abnormalities already in the prehypertensive stage.

Conclusion:

Considering the high frequency and health risks related to prehypertension, understanding the autonomic reactions to emotional and motor stimuli in this population is of clinical and theoretical importance and could serve as a behavioural marker to identify at-risk groups.

Emotion processing in children who do and do not stutter: An ERP study of electrocortical reactivity and regulation to peer facial expressions

PURPOSE

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the neural correlates of emotion processing in 5- to 8-year-old children who do and do not stutter.

METHODS

Participants were presented with an audio contextual cue followed by images of threatening (angry/fearful) and neutral facial expressions from similarly aged peers. Three conditions differed in audio-image pairing: neutral context-neutral expression (neutral condition), negative context-threatening expression (threat condition), and reappraisal context-threatening expression (reappraisal condition). These conditions reflected social stimuli that are ecologically valid to the everyday life of children.

RESULTS

P100, N170, and late positive potential (LPP) ERP components were elicited over parietal and occipital electrodes. The threat condition elicited an increased LPP mean amplitude compared to the neutral condition across our participants, suggesting increased emotional reactivity to threatening facial expressions. In addition, LPP amplitude decreased during the reappraisal condition- evidence of emotion regulation. No group differences were observed in the mean amplitude of ERP components between children who do and do not stutter. Furthermore, dimensions of childhood temperament and stuttering severity were not strongly correlated with LPP elicitation.

CONCLUSION

These findings are suggestive that, at this young age, children who stutter exhibit typical brain activation underlying emotional reactivity and regulation to social threat from peer facial expressions.

Venomous snakes elicit stronger fear than nonvenomous ones: Psychophysiological response to snake images

Snakes have been important ambush predators of both primates and human hunter-gatherers throughout their co-evolutionary history. Viperid snakes in particular are responsible for most fatal venomous snakebites worldwide and thus represent a strong selective pressure. They elicit intense fear in humans and are easily recognizable thanks to their distinctive morphotype. In this study, we measured skin resistance (SR) and heart rate (HR) in human subjects exposed to snake pictures eliciting either high fear (10 venomous viperid species) or disgust (10 nonvenomous fossorial species). Venomous snakes subjectively evaluated as frightening trigger a stronger physiological response (higher SR amplitude) than repulsive non-venomous snakes. However, stimuli presented in a block (more intense stimulation) do not trigger a stronger emotional response compared to sequentially presented stimuli (less intense stimulation). There are significant interindividual differences as subjects with high fear of snakes confronted with images of viperid snakes show stronger, longer-lasting, and more frequent changes in SR and higher HR compared to low-fear subjects. Thus, we show that humans demonstrate a remarkable ability to discriminate between dangerous viperids and harmless fossorial snakes, which is also reflected in distinct autonomous body responses.

Blood pressure reaction to negative stimuli: Insights from continuous recording and analysis

Individuals with a tendency toward abnormally enhanced cardiovascular responses to stress are at greater risk of developing essential hypertension later in life. Accurate profiling of continuous blood pressure (BP) reactions in healthy populations is crucial for understanding normal and abnormal emotional reaction patterns. To this end, we examined the continuous time course of BP reactions to aversive pictures among healthy participants. In two experiments, we showed participants negative and neutral pictures while simultaneously measuring their continuous BP and heart rate (HR) reactions. In this study, BP reactions were analyzed continuously, in contrast to previous studies, in which BP responses were averaged across blocks. To compare time points along a temporal continuum, we applied a multi-level B-spline model, which is innovative in the context of BP analysis. Additionally, HR was similarly analyzed in order to examine its correlation with BP. Both experiments revealed a similar pattern of BP reactivity and association with HR. In line with previous studies, a decline in BP and HR levels was found in response to negative pictures compared to neutral pictures. In addition, in both conditions, we found an unexpected elevation of BP toward the end of the stimuli exposure period. These findings may be explained by the recruitment of attention resources in the presence of negative stimuli, which is alleviated toward the end of the stimulation. This study highlights the importance of continuous measurement and analysis for characterizing the time course of BP reactivity to emotional stimuli.

Self-Interest Induces Counter- Empathy at the Late Stage of Empathic Responses to Others' Economic Payoffs

Previous studies have found that individuals exhibit empathic responses when others are treated unfairly. However, there remains a lack of clarity over the extent to which self-interest regulates these empathic responses, and in identifying which component of empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, an experiment was designed based on a money distribution task with two conditions [observation condition (OC) vs. participation condition (PC)], and carried out using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). Behavioral data showed that the participants' empathic responses were consistent with their coplayers' emotional expressions in the OC, whereas they were inconsistent with the coplayers' expressions in the PC. The electrophysiological data showed that the neural encoding of facial expressions (reflected in the N170) was not affected by self-interest. However, the late stage of empathic responses (LPP) showed a decline when participants' self-interest was involved. Disadvantageous inequality and relatively fair distribution to others elicited a more pronounced feedback-related negativity (FRN) than advantageous inequality distribution in both the OC and PC. As the late stage of empathic responses is also indexed by the LPP amplitude, these results indicate that the participants were more concerned for their own outcomes than for others' benefits when self-interest was involved, which reduced their empathy toward their coplayers at the late stage of empathic responses.

Autonomic reactivity in blood-injection-injury and snake phobia

OBJECTIVE

This research aimed to study the salivary flow and other autonomic reactions -heart rate (HR) and skin conductance response (SCR)- in blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia and snake phobia participants, under the assumption that exposure to blood-related pictures in BII phobia will provoke an increase in parasympathetic activity that, in turn, will lead to a greater saliva production than other affective contents.

METHODS

We selected 18 BII phobia and 14 snake phobia participants along with 22 non-phobia individuals. All participants were exposed to 3 blocks of pictures (12 pictures per block) depicting either mutilations, snakes or neutral, household objects. Saliva samples were taken in the 2-min interval before and after each block.

RESULTS

In comparison to other contents, blood-related pictures provoked an increase in salivary flow in BII phobia participants, as well as an increase in the number of SCRs. In the snake phobia group, snake pictures provoked HR acceleration, but the SCRs they elicited did not differ from the SCRs provoked by the blood-related pictures.

CONCLUSION

BII phobia individuals react to their phobic object with a series of physiological changes resulting from a sympathetic-parasympathetic co-activation. This is in contrast with other specific phobias (e.g., small animal phobias) that usually show a sympathetically mediated, defensive reactivity when exposed to their disorder-relevant stimuli. These data support the use of therapeutic interventions in BII phobia that may differ in some respect from those used in other specific phobias.

Effects of prior mental effort on picture processing: An ERP investigation

The current study examined the aftereffects of mental effort on the processing of picture stimuli using neural measures. Ninety-seven healthy young adults were randomly assigned to exercise more versus less mental effort on a writing task. Then participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral affective images while P1, N1, P2, N2, P3, and late positive potential (LPP) magnitudes to the images were assessed. We found that performing the more (versus less) effortful writing task caused more negative N2 amplitudes to all images. In addition, and consistent with past research, emotional (versus neutral) images elicited more positive amplitudes on the N2, P3, and LPP components. Thus, prior mental effort appeared to reduce early attentional engagement with visual stimuli but did not diminish later attention modulation by emotional content. These findings suggest novel implications for understanding the behavioral aftereffects of mental effort and self-control.

Altered emotion regulation in obsessive-compulsive disorder as evidenced by the late positive potential

BACKGROUND

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with marked anxiety, which triggers repetitive behaviours or mental rituals. The persistence of pathological anxiety and maladaptive strategies to reduce anxiety point to altered emotion regulation. The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related brain potential (ERP) that reflects sustained attention to emotional stimuli and is sensitive to emotion-regulation instructions. We hypothesized that patients with OCD show altered electrocortical responses during reappraisal of stimuli triggering their symptoms.

METHOD

To test our hypothesis, ERPs to disorder-relevant, generally aversive and neutral pictures were recorded while participants were instructed to either maintain or reduce emotional responding using cognitive distraction or cognitive reappraisal.

RESULTS

Relative to healthy controls, patients with OCD showed enhanced LPPs in response to disorder-relevant pictures, indicating their prioritized processing. While both distraction and reappraisal successfully reduced the LPP in healthy controls, patients with OCD failed to show corresponding LPP modulation during cognitive reappraisal despite successfully reduced subjective arousal ratings.

CONCLUSIONS

The results point to sustained attention towards emotional stimuli during cognitive reappraisal in OCD and suggest that abnormal emotion regulation should be integrated in models of OCD.

Snake fearfulness is associated with sustained competitive biases to visual snake features: hypervigilance without avoidance

The extent and time course of competition between a specific fear cue and task-related stimuli in early human visual cortex was investigated using electrophysiology. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were evoked using random-dot kinematograms that consisted of rapidly flickering (8.57 Hz) dots moving randomly, superimposed upon emotional or neutral distractor pictures. Participants were asked to detect intervals of coherently moving dots, ignoring the distractor pictures that varied in hedonic content. Women reporting high or low levels of snake fear were recruited from a large sample of healthy college students, and snake pictures served as fear-relevant distractors. The time-varying amplitude of the ssVEP evoked by the motion detection task showed significant reduction when viewing emotionally arousing, compared to neutral, distractors, replicating previous studies. For high-fear participants, snake distractors elicited a sustained attenuation of task evoked ssVEP amplitude, greater than the attenuation prompted by other unpleasant arousing content. These findings support a hypothesis that fear cues prompt sustained hypervigilance rather than perceptual avoidance.

Exploring implicit ingroup and outgroup bias toward Hispanics

Racial and ethnic biases often manifest without awareness. The underlying causes of these attitudes are not fully understood. While outgroup bias is well studied, ingroup bias has received far less attention. We examined ingroup biases among Hispanic women and outgroup biases toward Hispanics among White (Caucasian non-Hispanic) females using the startle eyeblink paradigm, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and an explicit self-report measure. Hispanic and White male faces were used as exemplars during both the startle task and the IAT. A similar pattern of results were observed for indirect measures: both groups displayed startle and IAT responses indicative of negative attitudes toward Hispanic male faces relative to White male faces, although less so for Hispanic participants. Combined groups correlational analyses revealed a significant positive relationship between startle eyeblink amplitude and subtle subscale bias scores. However, no relationships were found between any measures when groups were examined separately. The comparable pattern of startle and IAT results suggests that in spite of the likelihood that these measures index different aspects of attitudes and tap into different processes, inter and intragroup biases are manifested similarly. The finding of negative ingroup biases among Hispanic females is consistent with system justification theory, which posits that members of devalued groups internalize negative stereotypes about their ingroup. This study extends startle eyeblink research of intergroup racial biases, while also expanding this line of research to intragroup biases. In doing so, these results add to our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying the persistent nature of stereotypes.

Neural control of vascular reactions: impact of emotion and attention

This study investigated the neural regions involved in blood pressure reactions to negative stimuli and their possible modulation by attention. Twenty-four healthy human subjects (11 females; age = 24.75 ± 2.49 years) participated in an affective perceptual load task that manipulated attention to negative/neutral distractor pictures. fMRI data were collected simultaneously with continuous recording of peripheral arterial blood pressure. A parametric modulation analysis examined the impact of attention and emotion on the relation between neural activation and blood pressure reactivity during the task. When attention was available for processing the distractor pictures, negative pictures resulted in behavioral interference, neural activation in brain regions previously related to emotion, a transient decrease of blood pressure, and a positive correlation between blood pressure response and activation in a network including prefrontal and parietal regions, the amygdala, caudate, and mid-brain. These effects were modulated by attention; behavioral and neural responses to highly negative distractor pictures (compared with neutral pictures) were smaller or diminished, as was the negative blood pressure response when the central task involved high perceptual load. Furthermore, comparing high and low load revealed enhanced activation in frontoparietal regions implicated in attention control. Our results fit theories emphasizing the role of attention in the control of behavioral and neural reactions to irrelevant emotional distracting information. Our findings furthermore extend the function of attention to the control of autonomous reactions associated with negative emotions by showing altered blood pressure reactions to emotional stimuli, the latter being of potential clinical relevance.

Time course of emotion-related responding during distraction and reappraisal

Theoretical accounts of emotion regulation (ER) discriminate various cognitive strategies to voluntarily modify emotional states. Amongst these, attentional deployment (i.e. distraction) and cognitive change (i.e. reappraisal), have been shown to successfully down-regulate emotions. Neuroimaging studies found that both strategies differentially engage neural structures associated with selective attention, working memory and cognitive control. The aim of this study was to further delineate similarities and differences between the ER strategies reappraisal and distraction by investigating their temporal brain dynamics using event-related potentials (ERPs) and their patterns of facial expressive behavior. Twenty-one participants completed an ER experiment in which they had to either passively view positive, neutral and negative pictures, reinterpret them to down-regulate affective responses (reappraisal), or solve a concurrently presented mathematical equation (distraction). Results demonstrate the efficacy of both strategies in the subjective control of emotion, accompanied by reductions of facial expressive activity (Corrugator supercilii and Zygomaticus major). ERP results indicated that distraction, compared with reappraisal, yielded a stronger and earlier attenuation of the late positive potential (LPP) magnitude for negative pictures. For positive pictures, only distraction but not reappraisal had significant effect on LPP attenuation. The results support the process model of ER, separating subtypes of cognitive strategies based on their specific time course.

Directed attention reduces processing of emotional distracters irrespective of valence and arousal level

Emotional stimuli tend to capture attention, and this so-called motivated attention is commonly measured using the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positive potential (LPP). We hypothesized that voluntary, directed attention reduces motivated attention more strongly for highly than moderately arousing pleasant or unpleasant pictures. Participants were instructed to direct their attention to either a picture at fixation or the letters flanking the picture. Pictures varied substantially in arousal and valence. When the pictures were attended to, EPN and LPP increased linearly with arousal. When the letters were attended to, these linear effects decreased in the EPN for pleasant and unpleasant pictures and in the LPP for pleasant pictures. Thus, directed attention decreases processing of emotional distracters more strongly for highly than moderately arousing pleasant and unpleasant pictures. These results are consistent with the view that directed attention decreases emotion effects on sensory gain.

The anxiety spectrum and the reflex physiology of defense: from circumscribed fear to broad distress

Guided by the diagnostic nosology, anxiety patients are expected to show defensive hyperarousal during affective challenge, irrespective of the principal phenotype. In the current study, patients representing the whole spectrum of anxiety disorders (i.e., specific phobia, social phobia, panic disorder with or without agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), posttraumatic stress disorder(PTSD)), and healthy community control participants, completed an imagery-based fear elicitation paradigm paralleling conventional intervention techniques. Participants imagined threatening and neutral narratives as physiological responses were recorded. Clear evidence emerged for exaggerated reactivity to clinically relevant imagery--most pronounced in startle reflex responding. However, defensive propensity varied across principal anxiety disorders. Disorders characterized by focal fear and impairment (e.g., specific phobia) showed robust fear potentiation. Conversely, for disorders of long-enduring, pervasive apprehension and avoidance with broad anxiety and depression comorbidity (e.g., PTSD secondary to cumulative trauma, GAD), startle responses were paradoxically diminished to all aversive contents. Patients whose expressed symptom profiles were intermediate between focal fearfulness and broad anxious-misery in both severity and chronicity exhibited a still heightened but more generalized physiological propensity to respond defensively. Importantly, this defensive physiological gradient--the inverse of self-reported distress--was evident not only between but also within disorders. These results highlight that fear circuitry could be dysregulated in chronic, pervasive anxiety, and preliminary functional neuroimaging findings suggest that deficient amygdala recruitment could underlie attenuated reflex responding. In summary, adaptive defensive engagement during imagery may be compromised by long-term dysphoria and stress-a phenomenon with implications for prognosis and treatment planning.

A startling absence of emotion effects: Active attention to the startle probe as a motor task cue appears to eliminate modulation of the startle reflex by valence and arousal

Research has shown that during emotional imagery, valence and arousal each modulate the startle reflex. Here, two imagery-startle experiments required participants to attend to the startle probe as a simple reaction time cue. In experiment 1, four emotional conditions differing in valence and arousal were examined. Experiment 2, to accentuate potential valence effects, included two negative high arousal, a positive high arousal and a negative low arousal condition. Imagery effectively manipulated emotional valence and arousal, as indicated by heart rate and subjective ratings. Compared to baseline, imagery facilitated startle responses. However, valence and arousal failed to significantly affect startle magnitude in both experiments and startle latency in Experiment 1. Results suggest that emotional startle modulation is eclipsed when the probe is significant for task completion and/or cues a motor response. Findings suggest that an active, rather than defensive, response set may interfere with affective startle modulation, warranting further investigation.

Emotional event-related potentials are reduced if negative pictures presented at fixation are unattended

Viewing of emotional pictures elicits two event-related potentials (ERPs) to emotional versus neutral pictures: an early posterior negativity (EPN) and a late positive potential (LPP). Because it is unresolved whether these indexes of emotional processing are reduced to task-irrelevant pictures at fixation, negative and neutral pictures from the International Affective Picture Set (IAPS) were shown at fixation together with 6 letters that surrounded the pictures. In separate tasks, participants were instructed to attend either the pictures or the letters. When the pictures were task relevant, results showed an EPN and LPP. In contrast, when the pictures were task irrelevant, the EPN was eliminated and the LPP reduced. Performance was high in both tasks (hit rates>87%), but somewhat better when the pictures were relevant. However, analyses showed no relationship between this performance difference and the differences in EPN and LPP between tasks. These results suggest that emotional processing of strong, negative pictures is sensitive to manipulations of attention even if the pictures are shown at fixation.