In the complex visual environment of everyday life, we have to select relevant over irrelevant information to achieve our current goals. From an evolutionary viewpoint, survival is our main goal in life. Therefore, our visual system has to prioritize emotional stimuli over neutral stimuli. Previous research, however, has not yet led to a converging theory on emotional modulation of early cognitive processes. Possibly because previous research emphasized the dissociation between unconscious and conscious emotional processing. Accordingly, two theories have emerged from this research; one claiming that emotional stimuli are processed via a subcortical route, the other claiming that emotional stimuli are processed via cortical networks. Unlike previous research, I will not dissociate between unconscious and conscious processing but I will investigate emotional modulation of visual selection as a function of time. The main questions I want to answer are 1) how prioritization of emotional stimuli occurs, 2) when in time prioritization occurs, 3) how the prioritization process evolves as a function of time and 4) what neural mechanisms may be involved. In this proposal I outline four projects in which I will use measures of eye movement behavior to index the time-course of emotional modulation and I will use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the cortical contributions to emotional modulation of visual selection. The combination of methods makes this research proposal unique and challenging and it is expected that these studies will lead to publications in a high impact journals. In addition, this research will contribute to the field of clinical research and clinical practice. Solving the questions outlined above are crucial in understanding excessive responses to potentially threatening events, as in anxiety disorders, as well as in (sub)optimal conditions in everyday life in which we appropriately have to respond to threatening stimuli.