The analyses next addressed Hypothesis 3 regarding whether the variances in relevant drinking-related outcomes were accounted for by baseline brain imaging even after considering baseline LR (see Table 3). These evaluations began with seven separate hierarchical regression analyses considering the seven baseline conditions (placebo, alcohol, or their difference score) in five ROIs that related to alcohol problems (the most consistent outcome). Each of these seven regressions entered both LR the baseline BOLD response contrast value to predict follow-up alcohol problems. The top of Table 3 describes the four regions where the baseline BOLD response contrast values incremented over LR in predicting problems. The second step considered the fact that, with rare exceptions (data not shown), the seven ROI BOLD response contrasts correlated significantly with each other with r’s between .29 and .76. Therefore, the four baseline ROI values that incremented over LR and related to future alcohol problems were entered along with LR into a single simultaneous entry regression analysis, with the result that only LR entered significantly, with R2 =.21, p=.008. Third, we noted the high correlations among the
