The frontal lobes supervise cognitive tasks, such as memory, attention, and response selection. Intact control of response selection fundamentally underpins adaptive decision-making. Thus, decision-making impairments may be considered evidence of executive impairment (Fig. 1). One theorized anatomical basis for such impairments is a relative dominance of signaling with an amygdala-driven impulsive system (AMG), relative to a prefrontal cortex (PFC) reflective system (Bechara, 2005). The amygdala's ability to drive impulsive, non-reflective response selection (or decision-making) is thought to stem from the amygdala's key role in conditioned responding (Balleine and Killcross, 2006), whereby appetitive or aversive stimuli (or contexts) come to trigger automatic responding to those stimuli. The product of such conditioning in the amygdala (AMG) is thought to underlie the craving triggered by people, places, and things associated with drug use, which may precipitate relapse to drug-seeking behavior (Weiss, 2005). Studies in animals have found that repeated drinking and withdrawal-abstinence cycles causes a progressive adaptive change to increase anxiety and negative affect, apparently through amygdale activation(Breese et al., 2005). Recruitment of brain stress amygdale activation has been suggested to cause the
