The article reviews a series of event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that demonstrate the consistent modulation of specific ERP components by emotional images. Emotional pictures, particularly those depicting natural pleasant and unpleasant scenes, elicit increased early posterior negativity (EPN), late positive potential (LPP), and sustained positive slow wave compared to neutral images. These modulations index different stages of stimulus processing, including perceptual encoding, working memory, and elaborate stimulus evaluation. The review also discusses the interaction of motivated attention with passive and active forms of attentional control, exploring how emotional cues are selectively processed based on stimulus novelty, emotional prime pictures, learned stimulus significance, and in the context of explicit attention tasks. ERP measures are found to be useful for assessing the emotion-attention interface at distinct processing stages, providing insights into two-stage models of stimulus perception. The findings suggest that emotional cues capture attentional resources automatically and that explicit attention to task-related stimuli can interfere with selective processing of emotional information. Additionally, the interplay between attention and emotion varies across processing stages, with explicit attention effects and emotional significance operating additively during early stages and synergistically during higher-order conceptual processing in working memory.The article reviews a series of event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that demonstrate the consistent modulation of specific ERP components by emotional images. Emotional pictures, particularly those depicting natural pleasant and unpleasant scenes, elicit increased early posterior negativity (EPN), late positive potential (LPP), and sustained positive slow wave compared to neutral images. These modulations index different stages of stimulus processing, including perceptual encoding, working memory, and elaborate stimulus evaluation. The review also discusses the interaction of motivated attention with passive and active forms of attentional control, exploring how emotional cues are selectively processed based on stimulus novelty, emotional prime pictures, learned stimulus significance, and in the context of explicit attention tasks. ERP measures are found to be useful for assessing the emotion-attention interface at distinct processing stages, providing insights into two-stage models of stimulus perception. The findings suggest that emotional cues capture attentional resources automatically and that explicit attention to task-related stimuli can interfere with selective processing of emotional information. Additionally, the interplay between attention and emotion varies across processing stages, with explicit attention effects and emotional significance operating additively during early stages and synergistically during higher-order conceptual processing in working memory.