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The anxiety inducing paradigms such as the threat-of-shock paradigm have provided ample data on the emotional processing of predictable and unpredictable threat, but little is known about the processing of aversive, threat-irrelevant stimuli in these paradigms. We investigated how the predictability of threat influences the neural visual processing of threat-irrelevant fearful and neutral faces. Thirty-two healthy individuals participated in an NPU-threat test, consisting of a safe or neutral condition (N) and a predictable (P) as well as an unpredictable (U) threat condition, using audio-visual threat stimuli. In all NPU-conditions, we registered participants' brain responses to threat-irrelevant faces via magnetoencephalography. The data showed that increasing unpredictability of threat evoked increasing emotion regulation during face processing predominantly in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions during an early to mid …