FIG. 1.

Schematic presentation of the modified executive reaction time (RT) test. Example of two trials. Subjects were instructed to respond to the orientation of a triangle with a button press if a Go signal was presented after the triangle, and to withhold from responding if a NoGo signal was presented. There were four different block types with identical sets of trials presented in random order, but with different stimuli (spider, flower, green, red) serving as Go and NoGo signals. In the emotion relevant condition, either a spider was a Go-signal and a flower was a NoGo signal or vice versa. In the emotionally irrelevant condition, one of the colors (red or green) was a Go signal and the other a NoGo signal, with emotional stimuli serving as task-irrelevant distractors. Therefore, with identical stimuli presented in different block types with the only difference being stimulus relevance to the task, mere physical properties of the stimuli do not explain different effects in emotionally relevant and irrelevant conditions. Similarly, with emotional (spider) and emotionally neutral stimuli (flower) constructed from the same line components, emotional effects observed in this study cannot be explained by any lower level visual attributes. Color image is available online at www.liebertpub.com/neu