In addition to atypical activation patterns in alcoholics, diminished volumes have been reported for brain structures associated with emotional and social functioning, such as orbitofrontal cortex, rostral anterior cingulate cortex, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus, and insula (Makris et al., 2008; Wobrock et al., 2009). These regions, which are part of the “social brain” (Insel and Fernald, 2004) and neural circuitry underlying emotion and reward processing (Schulte et al., 2010), are disproportionately affected in alcoholism (Moselhy et al., 2001; Oscar-Berman and Marinkovic, 2007; Makris et al., 2008). In a study that examined the relationship between DTI-based fiber tracking and fMRI during an emotional Stroop task, Schulte et al. (2012b) found that alcoholics demonstrated poorer Stroop-word performance, suggesting higher emotional interference, and this performance was correlated with lower white-matter integrity in the cingulate and corpus callosum.
