The studies cited above focused primarily on cognitive tasks, and, despite the impact of alcohol on affect [22], the relationship of these effects to LR has not been evaluated. The insula, anterior cingulate gyrus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala are important in the detection of emotionally salient stimuli, affective responses, and regulation of affect [23–29]. The amygdala is involved in fear conditioning [30], reward-related processing [31], encoding of emotionally salient stimuli [32], risk taking [33], processing positively valenced stimuli [34], as well as in the pathophysiology of anxiety disorders [35, 36]. Thus, these regions appear to be a confluent point of emotion, cognition and physiology, and appropriate regions of interest to consider for fMRI analyses of emotion-related tasks.
