The purpose of this thesis was to investigate whether the emotional content of the visual scene influences the inhibitory mechanisms subserving visual orienting. To achieve this aim, I employed a spatial cuing paradigm as the principal methodology. In this paradigm, an irrelevant visual cue is presented to a specific location just prior to the presentation of a target. When the interval between cue and target is sufficiently long (greater than approximately 300 ms), responses to the target are slower when the cue and target location are the same versus different, an effect referred to as inhibition of return (IOR). IOR was employed as a tool to investigate visual orienting in the presence of
emotionally relevant stimuli presented as cues and targets in the spatial cuing paradigm. Further, whether the mechanism underlying IOR influenced the emotional evaluations of
visual stimuli was also addressed. Adaptive accounts of IOR predict differential modulation of the effect dependent upon stimulus content (emotional, non-emotional). However, the proposed reflexive nature of IOR instead predicts insensitivity to the effect in the presence of emotion, rendering measures of IOR unchanged by the emotional content of cue and target stimuli. Evidence from across 16 experiments supported this latter reflexive hypothesis of IOR, indicating that the mechanisms underlying the effect are blind to the emotional content of the visual scene. However, in a final series of experiments I found affective consequences of IOR for stimulus evaluations, suggesting inhibitory mechanisms of visual orienting are not entirely independent from the emotion system.