The ability to regulate emotions is an important part of adaptive functioning in society. Advances in cognitive and affective neuroscience and biological psychiatry have facilitated examination of neural systems that may be important for emotion regulation. In this critical review we first develop a neural model of emotion regulation that includes neural systems implicated in different voluntary and automatic emotion regulatory subprocesses. We then use this model as a theoretical framework to examine functional neural abnormalities in these neural systems that may predispose to the development of a major psychiatric disorder characterized by severe emotion dysregulation, bipolar disorder.