Emotional automaticity is a matter of timing.

There has been a long controversy concerning whether the amygdala's response to emotional stimuli is automatic or dependent on attentional load. Using magnoencephalography and an advanced beamformer source localization technique, we found that amygdala automaticity was a function of time: while early amygdala responding to emotional stimuli (40-140 ms) was unaffected by attentional load, later amygdala response (280-410 ms), subsequent to frontoparietal cortex activity, was modulated by attentional load.