Large variability across individuals characterizes virtually all aspects of emotional processes. By understanding the extremes of this variability and the components of affective style to which they relate, the factors contributing to a vulnerability for psychopathology can be better understood. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of negative and positive emotion regulation, behavioral investigations of the initial perception and appraisal of the cause of facial expressions of emotion, and the instructed contextual manipulation of emotional responses to facial expressions were used to identify aspects of these individual difference producing this variability and the large range in emotional behavior observed across people. These studies revealed (1) Trait or dispositional negative affect predicts negative emotion regulation-related activity in the human amygdala, such that higher trait negative affect is associated with greater activity in the amygdala due to the voluntary and conscious maintenance of a negative emotional response. (2) State or current levels of both positive and negative affect predict activity due to positive emotion regulation in the human striatum. Lower levels of state negative, but higher levels of state positive affect are associated with greater activity in the left striatum due to maintenance of a positive emotional response. (3) Both trait and state negative affect levels predict how people will initially interpret or appraise the cause of the emotion in an emotional facial expression, for example, high negative affect is associated with a person feeling as if he or she caused the sadness in a sad facial expression. In fact, manipulating affect levels through mood induction is sufficient to produce differences in the degree to which people feel as if they caused the emotion expressed in sad and happy emotional facial expressions. Finally, manipulating the different interpretations of the cause of the emotion expressed in emotional facial expressions changes the viewer's subsequent emotional response to the expressions. Jointly, these findings suggest possible cognitive-affective mechanisms responsible for the abnormal behavioral and neural responses to emotional expressions exhibited by patients with mood disorders, their impaired psychosocial and interpersonal functioning, and the maintenance and reoccurrence of their depressive episodes
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