Tracy A. Dennis
Hunter College, The City University of New York, New  York
In psychology, the latter half of the 20th century was characterized by  a cognitive revolution.
Now, we may be in the midst of an affective  revolution, in which the roles of emotion and its
regulation in the  development of well-being and psychopathology are garnering  academic
attention, popular interest, and impassioned debate (Damasio, 1994;  Davidson, 2000; Davidson
& Sutton, 1995; Panksepp, 1998). This revolution  has, in part, rested upon the study of the
brain and grew in visibility  during the “decade of the brain” in the 1990's. Indeed,
neuroscientific tools  have provided unparalleled opportunities to examine the nature of emotion
and  its neural bases, and to clarify the measurement of emotional processes in the  absence of
easily observable behavior. This zeitgeist, affective  neuroscience, is often represented by
research using neuroimaging techniques  such as fMRI. The importance of such studies is
substantial, and this Special  Issue of Developmental Neuropsychology emerges in the context
of this  work.