While psychologists have made impressive progress in understanding cognition, and cognitive psychology is deservedly the "showcase" of our discipline, emotion has been relatively neglected probably because it was considered less suitable for scientific study. Nonetheless, the small group of "emotion" psychologists, with U Delaware's Carroll Izard among its leaders, has recently been augmented by a new cadre of investigators armed with neuroimaging tools and answering to the challenge of developing the science of emotion. While we are still at the beginning of this effort, we are making inroads and have learned, for example, that even more so than in the case of cognition, age and sex are immensely important factors affecting both behavior and its neyral substrates. The presentation will illustrate how we can study neural basis of emotion processing through examining sex differences and age effects. I will focus especially on sex differences in relation to processing threat- related and threat-irrelevant emotions.