In this pilot study, neural systems related to cognitive and emotional processing were examined using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging in five maltreated youth with depressive disorders and eleven non-maltreated healthy participants. Subjects underwent an emotional oddball task, where they detected infrequent ovals (targets) within a continual stream of phase-scrambled images (standards). Sad and neutral images were intermittently presented as task-irrelevant distracters. The maltreated youth revealed significantly decreased activation in the left middle frontal gyrus and right precentral gyrus to target stimuli and significantly increased activation to sad stimuli in bilateral amygdala, left subgenual cingulate, left inferior frontal gyrus, and right middle temporal cortex compared to non-maltreated participants. Additionally, the maltreated youth showed significantly decreased activation to both attentional targets and sad distracters in the left posterior middle frontal gyrus compared to non-maltreated participants. In this exploratory study of dorsal control and ventral emotional circuits, we found that maltreated youth with distress disorders demonstrated dysfunction of neural systems related to cognitive control and emotional processing