In addition, individuals at heightened risk for AUD are more vulnerable to stress-related alcohol use. For example, genetic and/or neural risk factors for AUD have been shown to increase the association between traumatic stress and alcohol use problems [24, 25]. There is also a growing literature suggesting that individuals exposed to traumatic stress differ in terms of temporally sensitive EEG-based measures of neural functional connectivity [26–32] (i.e., EEG alpha coherence and alpha hypoconnectivity in the Default Mode Network [22]), which are also associated with heightened risk for alcohol use disorder [28–31]. EEG coherence, the degree of synchrony in brain oscillatory activity between neural networks in two brain regions, is a heritable measure of neural functional connectivity that has been studied extensively and is correlated with various aspects of cognitive functioning and psychopathology [33–35]. While decades of research have focused on genetic and neurocognitive differences observed among those with alcohol use problems, few studies have examined interactions between measures of brain functioning and social environmental factors (e.g., traumatic stress) with respect to risk for alcohol use/misuse.
