Emotions are powerful motivators of our behaviour, whether they be driving us to find food for survival, to avoid ‘being food’ for another predator or helping us to negotiate our way through the maze of social interactions critical for our ultimate success as individuals. Thus, ignoring our emotions is at our own peril. However, because of the central role they play in our decision making their regulation is paramount and not surprisingly, failure to regulate effectively has a major deleterious impact on our mental health. Symptoms of emotion dysregulation, including anxiety and anhedonia, are widespread across psychiatric, neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders but whether they respond to any of the treatments currently available is unpredictable. For progress to be made we need a far better understanding of how the brain achieves emotion regulation. This chapter sets out our current knowledge of how the brain contributes to both regulation and dysregulation of emotion and highlights some of the outstanding questions in the field.