Objective Negative information has the priority to capture and maintain humans attention.Research results have shown that people with emotional disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety) would not automatically pay attention to negative information compared to healthy counterparts, but have difficulties in disengaging attention from it once the negative information is detected, suggesting that the delayed disengagement hypothesis may underlie the mechanism of negative attentional bias.However, how the disengagement component of attention would be influenced by different emotions is not clear yet.With this consideration, the present study is to explore the time course of attentional disengagement from emotional information.Methods An object-based cue-target paradigm was adopted in this study: an emotional (happy / sad) or a neutral facial cue was firstly presented at the fixation, followed by a digit target (3 or 5) requiring participants to respond.The interval between cue and target (CTI) was manipulated at five values, including 17, 350, 1000, 600 and 1500 ms (the last two CTIs were conducted in a following complementary experiment).The reaction times (RTs) to the subsequent targets were measured to reflect the disengagement from the previous emotional cues indirectly.Forty right-handed students (aged 21.9±2.0 years, 26 males) from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University took part in the experiments.Results (1) RTs decreased significantly as CTIs increased until up to 1000 ms; (2) Responses after positive cues were significantly faster than those after neutral ones in the 17 ms CTI conditions, but no difference in longer CTI conditions; (3) Responses after negative cues were significantly slower than those after positive and neutral ones during short and long CTIs, even at 1500 ms after cues offset.Conclusion RTs to the subsequent targets have been significantly influenced by CTIs and the emotion type of cues.It takes a relatively short time ranging from 350 to 1000 ms to disengage attention from preceding cues.However, the negative cues have a profound and longer lasting effect on the detection of subsequent targets.Given that more attenitonal resources might be engaged on negative stimuli, there would be a trend that it takes subjects longer time to disengage attention from negative than from positive or neutral information.In contrast, subjects spend less time in disengaging from positive information in the cases of short CTIs, which implies the positive cues may facilitate subjects response to the following targets.