Negative emotional pictures, such as angry or fearful faces, threatening animals, weapons, etc. appear to automatically capture our attention. For example, in the emotion-induced blindness paradigm (EIB), a task-irrelevant negative picture appearing in a rapid stream of scene pictures captures attention and suppresses the detection of a closely following target picture. This apparently rapid attention capture driven by emotional valence may be analogous to capture by physically salient objects that possess a unique feature such a motion or color. The existence of a subcortical mechanism (the amygdala) that provides extremely short latency responses to emotional stimuli is consistent with the idea that emotional information may be processed early in time to rapidly guide attention to threatening stimuli. We have examined this proposal in a series of studies using ERP and behavioral measures to understand the nature of attention capture in EIB. We conclude that EIB is similar to the attentional blink and that interference occurs late in processing, not early as the emotional salience hypothesis predicts.