“…Regardless of the specific task performed, emotional conflict is greater when the to-be attended and the to-be ignored stimuli (i.e., distractors) are affectively incongruent than when they are congruent or neutral. Importantly, emotional distractors yield a larger incongruence effect (i.e., interference) and greater performance impairment (i.e., slower responses and lower accuracy), compared to neutral distractors (e.g., Stenberg et al, 1998 ; Pecchinenda and Heil, 2007 ; Zhu et al, 2010 ; Strand et al, 2013 ; Pecchinenda et al, 2015 ; Ma et al, 2016 ; Petrucci and Pecchinenda, 2017 ; Viviani et al, 2021 ), independently of whether emotion is task relevant. Depending on the specific methodology used, this effect can stem from different underlying mechanisms, but response interference is always involved ( Musch and Klauer, 2003 ).…”