No neurobehavioral evidence for reduced motivational potential of social rewards in alcohol use disorder during early abstinence

The mesolimbic dopamine system plays a central role in motivating behavior. In alcohol use disorder (AUD), this system is thought to be dysfunctional, leading to hyperreactivity to alcohol-related cues. In contrast, evidence on how individuals with AUD respond to alcohol-unrelated reward cues is inconclusive, and the motivation for social rewards has not yet been investigated. To address this gap, 36 individuals with AUD during early abstinence and 34 healthy controls performed an incentive delay task to assess social reward anticipation with a monetary and a non-reward control condition while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The ventral striatum was defined as region of interest because of its central role in neuronal circuits for motivation. Neither behavioral nor neuroimaging data provided any evidence of reduced motivation for social or monetary rewards in AUD. Exploratory whole-brain analyses only revealed stronger activation in the occipital/cuneal cortex in individuals with AUD than in healthy controls across all trials. Together, these results suggest that sensitivity to social reward cues is not fundamentally impaired in AUD. Furthermore, they imply that motivational changes related to the substance do not generally alter the reward potential of alcohol-unrelated domains in AUD, opening perspectives for social-behavioral treatments for this disorder.