This chapter briefly talks about the following concepts: preattentive, automatic, and unaware. These terms, routinely used when describing the effects of emotional information, have many unintended meanings and relationships. The chapter reviews some specific evidence against and for the idea that attention is required for emotional processing. It reviews the role of attention in the processing of emotion-laden visual information and discusses both evidence for and against automaticity. A study presented here reveals that the contrast of affectively significant and neutral Miss trials did not reveal significant differential responses in the amygdala. In summary, the results from attentional blink experiments suggest that emotion-laden stimuli are also subject to the blink, which goes counter to the notion of strong automaticity. Two more studies described here provide important insights about the temporal unfolding of affective responses in the brain.