ANGRY FACES AND THE ATTENTIONAL BLINK 1341 example, speed is important when coping with threat-related stimuli such as fear-relevant animals (e.g., snakes) or negative emotional expressions (e.g., angry face); fast identification of such stimuli allows early activation of defence systems (LeDoux, 1996; O¨ hman, 1996). Thus, it is no surprise that recent behavioural and neuroimaging research has focused on how emotional stimuli influence information processing. A main theme emerging from this research is that the processing of threat stimuli is prioritised relative to non-threat stimuli. Indeed, it has been proposed that threat stimuli capture and hold attention in a manner unlike that of non-emotional stimuli (e.g., O¨ hman, 1996; O¨ hman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001), have a privileged processing status (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001) and, controversially, can be processed independently of top-down attention (O¨ hman, 2002; but see also Pessoa, Kastner, & Ungerlieder, 2002). One paradigm that has been used to investigate attentional processing of emotional information is the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, which assesses a cognitive phenomenon known as the ‘‘attentional blink’’ (AB). In a typical RSVP study of the AB, two targets are presented in a stream of distractor stimuli. If these targets are presented in quick succession, accurate report of the second target is impaired when it is presented 200 400 ms (or 2 3 items) after the first target (e.g., Kranczioch, Debener, Schwarzbach, Goebel, & Engel, 2005; Shapiro, Arnell, & Raymond, 1997a). This performance decrement, or AB, is thought to reflect competition between different stimuli for attentional resources. According to cognitive theories of the AB, the effect occurs at an early stage of processing within the cognitive system where there are limited-capacity processing resources (see Shapiro et al., 1997a, for a review). Interestingly, when the second target is a motivationally salient or emotional stimulus, the AB is much reduced. For example, Shapiro, Caldwell, and Sorensen (1997b) found that the AB was abolished when the second target stimulus in an RSVP stream was the participant’s own name. Other studies, which have used emotional words (or Chinese ideographs, which vary in emotional valence) as target stimuli, have found that the AB is reduced when the second target stimulus is a negative or aversive stimulus, rather than a neutral stimulus (e.g., Anderson, 2005; Anderson & Phelps, 2001; Ogawa & Suzuki, 2004). Thus, this research suggests that emotional stimuli, such as negative words, have a special attentional status and are more readily detected than neutral stimuli (see also Barnard, Ramponi, Battye, & Mackintosh, 2005; Most, Chun, Widders, & Zald, 2005, for additional evidence from RSVP tasks of attentional effects of emotional stimuli). However, Anderson (2005) noted that RSVP studies using emotional words as stimuli do not directly address predictions from cognitive and neural models, which propose that attentional prioritisation of threat cues should be most apparent for special classes of biologically prepared stimuli, such as