We introduce a novel affective Voluntary Task-Switching paradigm to explore the influence of emotional content on voluntary task choice and task performance. On each trial, participants were presented with facial stimuli differing by gender, age or emotion, and freely choose which task to execute. Voluntary task switches were required in two distinct contexts: An Emotion -Relevant context (participants switch between the emotion vs. gender judgment) and an Emotion -Irrelevant context (age vs. gender judgment with emotional distractors). To encourage task switching, we presented separate faces for each task and introduced waiting times for the respective task repetition stimulus, whereby the waiting times increased with the number of consecutive task repetitions. Like expected participants responded slower in task switch compared to task repetition trials and task switch rates correlate with these switch costs. Importantly, the emotional content of the stimuli impacted differently on task decision and performance depending on its relevance. In the Emotion Relevant context, participants switched more frequently after performing the emotional rather than the neutral task. In the Emotion Irrelevant context, participants switched more frequently after encountering an emotional rather than neutral stimulus as distractor. Further, participants responded faster to emotional stimuli in the emotion task, while task performance was decreased when for emotional stimuli in the gender task in the Emotion Relevant context and in both tasks in the Emotion irrelevant context. Taken together, these findings indicate an “emotional escape mechanism” in line with automatic attentional capture due to emotional stimuli.