OBJECTIVE: Patients with bipolar mania have difficulty in recognizing or attending to negatively affective stimuli and have an affective bias, which is congruent with the current mood. However, previous reports have adopted words or facial pictures, not scenic pictures as affective stimuli. In this study, patients with mania performed the word, face and scenic picture-based affective go-nogo tasks respectively. The results were compared to those of patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. 0aMETHODS: Twenty patients with bipolar mania, 20 patients with schizophrenia, and 20 healthy comparison subjects, matched for age, gender and intelligence, performed affective gonogo tasks which contained happy/sad words, facial pictures, and scenic pictures respectively. 0aRESULTS: On the scenic picturebased affective go-nogo task, a significant interaction between subject group and target valence emerged {F (2, 57)ond to sad than to happy stimuli (td-congruent bias toward affective scenic pictures, but not toward affective word or facial pictures. This finding suggests that complex and scenic stimuli may give a more influence on the affective arousal state and therefore increase the mood-congruent bias in manic patients.