The goals of the current study were to examine how medial frontal responses to alcohol cues are modified by mood, how negative and positive urgency traits are related to neural responses to alcohol cues and mood, and how urgency and neural responses to alcohol’s olfactory cues are related to alcohol craving and problematic alcohol use. Although mood did not affect neural responses to alcohol’s olfactory cues, the data suggest that neural responses to these cues in the vmPFC, a region thought to both encode subjective reward value (Hare et al., 2008, 2009; Kable & Glimcher, 2007), are related to negative urgency. Additionally, neural responses to alcohol’s olfactory cues in this region relate to subjective alcohol craving and problematic alcohol use through, in part, the trait of negative urgency.
