Anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric diagnoses, affecting roughly one in three people over the lifespan (Kessler et al., 2012; US Burden of Disease Collaborators, 2018). These disorders are linked to serious adverse outcomes and are a leading cause of disability worldwide (Baxter et al., 2013; Beddington et al., 2008; Vos et al., 2016). Transdiagnostic features like inhibited temperament and dispositional negativity are risk factors for the development of these disorders (Moser et al., 2015; Shackman et al., 2016). At their core, these features reflect an impaired ability to select adaptive emotion-relevant responses, which can manifest as maladaptive behaviors and worsen anxiety (Shackman et al., 2016). In this chapter, we review translational evidence suggesting that the central extended amygdala (EAc) can promote maladaptive responses when it becomes dysregulated (Alheid, 2003; Fox et al., 2015; Shackman & Fox, 2016). The EAc is best known for its role in defensive responding, and we review evidence of its critical involvement in threat processing. However, rodent findings reveal that the EAc is also deeply involved in promoting a range of appetitive and consummatory behaviors. These exciting findings suggest that the function of the EAc is not simply to make us feel anxious or afraid, but rather to select between competing emotion-relevant responses that optimize fitness across a variety of survival-relevant contexts. Here, we outline how EAc dysregulation can dispositionally bias an individual toward the selection of inhibited behaviors, in contextually inappropriate situations. These insights form a translational framework for investigating the mechanisms our brains use to select adaptive emotion-relevant responses, and how alterations of those mechanisms can lead to anxious pathology.