The lab was awarded a 5-year, $3M award from the NIAAA.

Alcohol misuse is a leading cause of human misery, morbidity, and mortality. Existing treatments are far from curative. While the roots of alcohol misuse are complex and multifactorial, Anxiety plays a key role. Models of addiction suggest that many drinkers misuse alcohol to relieve excess anxiety (‘self-medicate’). Yet the factors governing anxiety-fueled alcohol misuse remain incompletely understood.

This project will use a combination of techniques—including functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and smartphone digital phenotyping—in a racially diverse sample drawn from the surrounding community to

• Identify the brain regions and facets of threat uncertainty most relevant to variation in alcohol use, symptoms, and problems
• Pinpoint potentially modifiable psychosocial factors that trigger alcohol craving and consumption
• Determine the neural systems most relevant to anxiety-fueled alcohol misuse in the real world

In sum, alcohol use disorder and risky drinking, more generally, are notoriously heterogeneous, with thousands of unique clinical presentations. By focusing on a theoretically coherent set of dimensional measures in a diverse, clinically relevant sample, this project has the potential to overcome this barrier and provide fresh insights into the neurocomputational factors governing anxiety-fueled alcohol misuse. Building on well-established neuroeconomic models and a fruitful line of psychophysiological research, this study will provide a potentially transformative opportunity to identify new treatment targets; guide the development of new translational models; and inform the development of new digital interventions.

This project represents a collaboration between the Shackman laboratory and investigators at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (Dr. John Curtin) and University of California, Davis (Drs. Drew Fox and Erie Boorman).