Abstract: Aiming at the relationship of emotion and cognition, our research group established four series of affective stimulating system including scene pictures, emotional faces, Chinese characters and sounds. Using these materials, we explored the emotional influences on attention and working memory, and the cognitive patterns of trait anxiety persons through series of ERP experiments. The results showed that: a). emotional negative stimuli possessed some kind superiority in several stages of information processing, such as attention, evaluation and reaction readiness, etc. Attentional bias was observed in an implicit task either. It seems that negative stimuli can compensate the shortage of attentional resources to some extent. b). the visual processing was modulated by the former threatening visual cues. High anxious persons intend to pay more attention to them. Further more, threatening visual stimuli influenced the haptic attention, i.e., it was a cross-modal effect. c). in a spatial working memory task, the amplitudes of P300 were reduced by the negative emotion, while this was not observed in a verbal task. It was inferred that the spatial working memory effect might be mediated by the parietal attentional system

Key words: emotion, event-related brain potentials, attention, working memory, anxious