While our principal findings implicate broad amygdala activity to emotional facial expressions, which can convey varying degrees of threat, our subsequent expression-specific analyses revealed that amygdala activity to unspecified environmental threat as conveyed by fearful facial expressions in our paradigm specifically contributes to risk in our sample. Prior work suggests that amygdala activity to fearful facial expressions may be specifically associated with anxiety and sensitivity to distress, whereas amygdala activity to angry expressions may tap more directly into aggression and reactivity to interpersonal challenge.35, 58 Thus, the relative specificity of our results to fearful expressions is consistent with the construal of the low VS-high amygdala phenotype as predisposing to alcohol-related problems via an affective risk pathway and supports the broader conceptualization of our findings.
