Over the past few decades, studies have reported electrophysiological abnormalities related to resting state and during cognitive processing in individuals with AUDs and in high risk (HR) subjects with a family history of alcoholism (for reviews, see [17–19]). Dysregulation in reward systems is a prominent dysfunction in alcoholism [20–22], and electrophysiological studies during gambling paradigms have revealed reward processing dysfunction in alcoholics and HR offspring [23–26]. ERP studies of reward processing have frequently employed monetary gambling tasks and examined two major components: a negative going component around 200–250 ms called the outcome- or feedback-related negativity (ORN or FRN or N2), and a positive going component at about 300–500 ms called the outcome- or feedback-related positivity (ORP or FRP or P3) [27–42]. These outcome-related ERP components have been shown to be predominantly composed of theta oscillations [14,30,39,43–45] that mediate aspects of cognitive processing [14,15,46–60], and have been implicated in several neuropsychiatric disorders (for reviews, see [15,61–63]), including alcoholism [4,16,49,64–66].
