Emotional stimuli are argued to capture attention and consume attentional resources differently depending on their emotionalcontent. The present study investigates the impact of the automatic detection of unexpected and to-be-ignored emotional stimuli onhuman behavioral responses, and aims to unravel the differences in distraction between two negative emotional stimuli: sadness and anger.Forty participants (Mage= 25.5 years) performed a visual categorization task where angry and sad emoji faces were presented after eithera standard neutral tone (in 80% of trials) or a deviant emotional sound (tone changing in pitch; sad or angry sound in 10% of trials each)that was to be ignored. Deviant trials were either congruent (e.g., sad sound—sad face) or incongruent (e.g., angry sound—sad face).Although the stimuli presented to the participants were brief and to-be-ignored, results indicate that participants were significantly moredistracted by sad compared to angry stimuli (seen as prolonged response times). Findings are discussed with reference to the nature ofthe two negative emotions.