Our amygdala and VS reactivity paradigms have been described in detail previously.34, 35 Briefly, the amygdala reactivity paradigm consists of 4 blocks of a face-processing task interleaved with 5 blocks of a sensorimotor control task. During task blocks, participants view a trio of faces (with neutral, angry, fearful or surprised expressions) and match 1 of 2 faces (bottom) identical to a target face (top). During control blocks, participants match simple geometric shapes. Here, we focus on the contrast of all task blocks versus control blocks (i.e., All Faces > Shapes), as all four facial expressions in our paradigm convey threat to varying degrees.36–39 Thus, we construe the All Faces > Shapes contrast as broadly threat-related. In an exploratory set of analyses we further investigated each expression-specific contrast independently to examine the extent to which amygdala reactivity to specific forms of threat (e.g., threat originating from an unspecified source in the shared environment as conveyed by fearful expressions or threat originating from a discrete source as conveyed by angry expressions) may modulate the relation between stress, VS activity and alcohol use.
