Tell me about it: neural activity elicited by emotional pictures and preceding descriptions

Emotional pictures elicit enhanced parietal positivities beginning around 300 ms following stimulus presentation. The magnitude of these responses, however, depends on both intrinsic (stimulus-driven) and extrinsic (context-driven) factors. In the present study, event-related potentials were recorded while participants viewed unpleasant and neutral pictures that were described either more neutrally or more negatively prior to presentation; temporospatial principal components analysis identified early and late positivities: Both emotional images and descriptions had independent and additive effects on early (334 ms) and midlatency (1,066 ms) positivities, whereas the latest positivity (1,688 ms) was sensitive only to description type. Results are discussed with regard to the time course of automatic and controlled processing of emotional stimuli.