In addition to reward processing, the ACC, mPFC, and amygdala may play a role in affective processing. Long-term alcohol abstinent men with AUD had altered temporal limbic activation in response to emotional faces compared to healthy men, suggesting that deficient amygdala and hippocampus activation may underlie impairments in the processing of emotionally salient stimuli in AUD (Marinkovic et al., 2009). However, that study included only men. When examining both sexes, results suggest frontal brain activation in response to affective or arousing stimuli, albeit in opposing directions depending on SG (Ide et al., 2018; Padula, Anthenelli, Eliassen, Nelson, & Lisdahl, 2015; Sawyer et al., 2019). For example, men with AUD showed greater activation than healthy men in response to fearful faces in the inferior frontal gyrus, whereas women with AUD showed lower activation than healthy women in response to fearful faces (Padula et al., 2015). The same pattern of findings was found in response to happy faces in the left caudate, right middle frontal gyrus, left paracentral lobule, and right lingual gyrus (Padula et al., 2015). Most recently, Sawyer and colleagues
