Alcohol cues (e.g. sight or smell of alcohol) can trigger alcohol craving (e.g., Carter & Tiffany, 1999), attentional biases (e.g., Field & Eastwood, 2005), and consumption (e.g., Perkins et al., 1994). The brain’s medial prefrontal cortex region is likely to play a key role in these effects (Engleman et al., 2006). The aromas of both alcohol and food provoke significant medial prefrontal activity (Bragulat et al., 2010; Eiler, et al., 2011; Kareken et al., 2010b), where the extent of BOLD activation is associated with the subjective reward value of stimuli (Hare et al., 2009). Negative and positive urgency traits, particularly in conditions of extreme mood, might then bias attention to alcohol cues (Coskunpinar et al., in press), which, in turn, induce craving (Pavlick, 2007) and subsequent alcohol consumption (Cyders et al., 2010). Activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a particular candidate mechanism for such mood-cue reactivity, given its theorized role in affect-guided planning (Bechara et al., 2000; Naqvi et al., 2006) and subjective reward value (Bragulat et al., 2010; Eiler et al., 2011; Kareken et al., 2010b), and
