The focus of this study was on examining whether individuals with a low LR to alcohol demonstrated unique emotion-related brain processing compared to subjects with high LR, thus extending previous fMRI findings with high and low LR subjects that had used cognitive tasks. Prior papers evaluated BOLD contrasts across placebo and alcohol for low and high LR groups during a VWM task and in the context of a stop signal task, with no clear evidence of hemispheric lateralization [17–20]. The most prominent pattern of prior results was that low LR subjects were likely to decrease BOLD response contrast from placebo to alcohol, while the high LR subjects demonstrated the opposite pattern. However, no prior study evaluated results when the focus was on emotional responding rather than executive functions.
