Selective visual attention to emotional words: Early parallel frontal and visual activations followed by interactive effects in visual cortex

Human brains spontaneously differentiate between various emotional and neutral stimuli, including written words whose emotional quality is symbolic. In the electroencephalogram (EEG), emotional–neutral processing differences are typically reflected in the early posterior negativity (EPN, 200–300 ms) and the late positive potential (LPP, 400–700 ms). These components are also enlarged by task‐driven visual attention, supporting the assumption that emotional content naturally drives attention. Still, the spatio‐temporal dynamics of interactions between emotional stimulus content and task‐driven attention remain to be specified. Here, we examine this issue in visual word processing. Participants attended to negative, neutral, or positive nouns while high‐density EEG was recorded. Emotional content and top‐down attention both amplified the EPN component in parallel. On the LPP, by contrast, emotion and attention interacted: Explicit attention to emotional words led to a substantially larger amplitude increase than did explicit attention to neutral words. Source analysis revealed early parallel effects of emotion and attention in bilateral visual cortex and a later interaction of both in right visual cortex. Distinct effects of attention were found in inferior, middle and superior frontal, paracentral, and parietal areas, as well as in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Results specify separate and shared mechanisms of emotion and attention at distinct processing stages. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3575–3587, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.