Findings from lesion studies and from neuroimaging studies in healthy subjects suggest that an increase in right-sided activation in various sectors of the prefrontal cortex is associated with increased negative affect. Preliminary results from an fMRI study (Howard et al 2003) have suggested that while nonalcoholic controls exhibited strong right frontal activation when viewing faces (see Figure 2), especially with negative emotional expressions, alcoholics displayed reduced right frontal activation (Howard et al 2003).
