Background: Subcortical ischemic vascular dementia (SIVD) represents an important subgroup of vascular dementia. Besides characteristic cognitive deficits, particular emotional problems support the diagnosis. Emotional disturbances in SIVD are not well understood. Method: We studied the performance of SIVD patients, healthy young control persons and old control persons in an emotional word list learning task. Results: SIVD patients showed lower memory performance than both control groups for neutral as well as for negative words. However, we found a significant emotional memory advantage for negative words in all 3 diagnostic groups. Conclusion: SIVD patients are able to profit from emotional information in order to enhance their memory performance.