Recent years have shown an increased interest in the cognitive and neural basis of emotion in psychiatric and neurological disorders. Indeed, various methods of behavioural and neural measurement of emotional processes are continually being developed and refined, which has led to an explosion of research in this area. This Special Issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry brings together timely reviews and new empirical papers regarding the cognitive and neural basis of emotional processing in health and disease, written by renowned researchers in the field. Clinical conditions that are addressed include amygdala damage, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, social phobia, psychopathy and alexithymia.