Although alpha‐band activity has long been a focus of psychophysiological research, its modulation by emotional value during picture perception has only recently been studied systematically. Here, we review these studies and report that the most consistent alpha oscillatory pattern indexing emotional processing is an enhanced desynchronization (ERD) over posterior sensors when viewing emotional compared with neutral pictures. This enhanced alpha ERD is not specific to unpleasant picture content, as previously proposed for other measures of affective response, but has also been observed for pleasant stimuli. Evidence suggests that this effect is not confined to the alpha band but that it also involves a desynchronization of the lower beta frequencies (8–20 Hz). The emotional modulation of alpha ERD occurs even after massive stimulus repetition and when emotional cues serve as task‐irrelevant distractors, consistent with the hypothesis that evaluative processes are mandatory in emotional picture processing. A similar enhanced ERD has been observed for other significant cues (e.g., conditioned aversive stimuli, or in anticipation of a potential threat), suggesting that it reflects cortical excitability associated with the engagement of the motivational systems.

This study was designed to investigate the evolution of emotional processing over the whole adult life span as a function of stimulus arousal and participants’ gender. To this end, self-reported affective evaluation and attentional capture prompted by pleasant and unpleasant pictures varying in arousal were measured in a large sample of participants (n = 211) balanced by gender and equally spread across seven decades from 20 to 90 years. Results showed age differences only for affective evaluation of pleasant stimuli, with opposite patterns depending on stimulus arousal. As age increased, low-arousing pleasant cues (e.g. images of babies) were experienced as more pleasant and arousing by both males and females, whereas high-arousing stimuli (e.g. erotic images) were experienced as less pleasant only by females. In contrast, emotional pictures (both pleasant and unpleasant) were effective at capturing attention in a similar way across participants, regardless of age and gender. Taken together, these findings suggest that specific emotional cues prompt different subjective responses across different age groups, while basic mechanisms involved in attentional engagement towards both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli are preserved in healthy ageing.