Abstract: Some researchers have reported that emotional stimuli could be perceived even observers were unaware of the stimuli. In these studies, Awareness was controlled either by manipulating the stimulus conditions or by instructing observers on how to distribute their attention, however objective measure of visual awareness indicated that the criteria used to determine visual awareness on previous studies were not effective. Recent studies by signal detection theory methods show that attention is important for emotional visual stimuli perception, and emotion perception is modulated by attention via both exogenous bottom-up and endogenous top-down methods. Besides, the degree of such modulation correlates with personality and trait anxiety variables

Key words: Attention, consciousness, awareness, focus of attention