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Highlights • Hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestions reduce space-valence congruency effects in HHIs. • Both suggestions reduce P2 effects indicating suggestion modulates early attention. • Hypotic suggestion does not affect LPC for positive targets in HHI. • Down arrows evoked larger LPC than up ones with non-hypnotic suggestion in HHIs. Abstract Previous studies have shown that the speed of identifying emotional words is affected by pre-cues of up or down arrows, called the space-valence congruency effect (Zhang, Hu, Zhang, & Wang, 2015). In the present study, we investigate whether this effect is influenced by hypnotic or non-hypnotic suggestions to ignore pre-cues in highly hypnotizable individuals (HHIs). In all conditions, target words (including positive words, negative words and neutral words) primed by up or down arrows were presented to pre-screened HHIs. They were asked to identify whether the target words had emotional valence. Behavioral results showed that the space-valence congruency effect was absent in the hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion groups, but present in the non-suggestion control group. Consistently, the amplitudes of P2 components elicited by negative words were significantly larger when primed by down than by up arrows in the non-suggestion control group, and this P2 effect was absent in the hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion groups. Moreover, the amplitudes of the late positive components (LPC) showed no significant arrow-priming difference for positive targets in the hypnotic-suggestion and control groups. However, in the non-hypnotic suggestion group, the amplitudes of LPC were significantly larger when primed by down than up arrows for positive targets. Our results showed that suggestions, even without a hypnotic induction, can de-automatize embodied emotional recognition processes and modulate early attentional processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]