Depression is characterized by a stable bias toward negative emotional stimuli.The bias is associated with abnormal activities in emotion-processing regions such as amygdala and cognitive-control regions such as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).However, it is not clear right now whether emotion-processing regions and cognitive-control regions have an independent or reciprocal action on the negative cognitive bias.A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study with 16 depressed patients and 16 matched control subjects was conducted during the emotion-interference task.We found that, compared with control participants, depressed patients showed lower accuracies, abnormal activities in right amygdala and right DLPFC, and significant correlation between the two regions when they attended to happy faces.However, they did not exhibit such results in other conditions.These results suggest that the dysfunction in positive emotion-processing regions and cognitive-control regions may have a reciprocal action on the negative cognitive bias.Additionally, altered positive emotional interference processing in the frontolimbie brain circuitry in depression might be the cause of negative cognitive bias which finally leads to depression.