A critical question in visual foraging concerns the factors driving target selection. Previous work suggests that target selection is achieved through competition between different factors (e.g., proximity, priming) that orient attention towards one of the possible targets. However, this research has mainly involved simple stimuli such as colored dots. In single-target visual search, emotional stimuli (e.g., pictures, faces) with positive or negative valence have been shown to capture attention over neutral stimuli. In the current study, we designed a visual-foraging task involving real-world photographs eliciting negative, neutral or positive emotions as stimuli. The 75 observers completed three foraging tasks corresponding to three emotional-valence conditions: in the positive, neutral, and negative blocks, participants had to select pre-specified images eliciting respectively positive, neutral and negative emotion, among neutral distractors. In each block, there were always two target types and two distractor types, and the task was to select all the targets as fast as possible, while ignoring the distractors. We measured observers’ foraging strategy (i.e., selection order, number of switches between target types) and performance (i.e., selection times, number of distractor selections). Additionally, we assessed participants’ trait-anxiety to examine how it could modulate the influence of emotional valence on foraging behavior. The results reveal that negative emotional valence influences both foraging strategy and performance, and suggest that these effects are modulated by participants’ trait-anxiety. These findings importantly show that emotional processing contributes to target selection during foraging and highlight the need for using ecologically-valid stimuli in visual-foraging research.