[Event related potentials and emotional pictures:effect of stimulus presentation time]

The perception of the emotional content of a stimulus is a preattentive automatic process which causes an emotional reaction. As the ongoing stream of behavior might be disturbed by the emotional reaction, a controlled process is initialited at the same time, which normally leads to an inhibition of the emotional response. By means of event related potentials it should be possible to observe these controlled processes. In a first study using photographs from the International Affective Picture System, Diedrich et al. (1997) reported enhanded P300 amplitudes for emotional stimuli, even when the task distracted from the emotional content of the stimuli. This was interpreted as an index of the additional, controlled information processing elicited by the emotional content of the stimuli. Additionally, Diedrich et al. observed a frontel slow positivity, which might indicate the inhibition of the emotional response. However, this frontal slow wave might also be explained by the stimulus presentation time, which lasted 500 ms. This study is a conceptual replication of the experiment of Diedrich et al. Stimulus presentation time of neutral and emotional slides was varied in three steps (250 ms, 500 ms and 2000 ms). Subjects either performed a structural or an emotion-focused task on the stimuli. The results for the P300 component were exactly replicated. However, the variation of slow frontal positivity differed from that in the first study. Differences in the intensity of the emotional stimuli are discussed as a reason für this result.