It is important to recognize that the brain response to alcohol in low LR subjects was not uniform. Specifically, for angry faces two regions had significant LR by condition interactions, but here, in the left and right middle frontal gyri, low LR subjects demonstrated increasing BOLD contrasts or small decreases across placebo to alcohol, while decreasing activation was seen for those with high LR. Using a no-alcohol paradigm, Marinkovic et al. [55] reported that individuals with AUDs demonstrated deficient activation in the amygdala and hippocampus when processing emotional faces, a finding that was hypothesized to potentially relate to difficulties they might have in recognizing emotional situations. It is important to keep in mind that the focus of the current work is on relatively highly functional individuals from a nonclinical sample, some of whom carry an enhanced risk for future alcohol problems through a low LR to alcohol, but none of whom have yet developed alcohol dependence.
