composed of frontal theta and posterior delta band powers. Additionally, each ERO band activity contributed unique information to discriminate between the groups. In order to investigate whether these deficits in theta and delta oscillations antecede the development of alcoholism, Rangaswamy et al. [141] investigated adolescent offspring of alcoholics (14-17 years) with age-matched normal controls in the large Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), using the same paradigm. They found that similar to the alcoholics, the adolescent offspring of alcoholics had reduced delta and theta band ERO amplitude while processing the target stimuli compared to controls. The differences were most prominent centroparietally for theta, and parietally for delta. On the basis of the finding that stronger differences between groups were observed for the ERO oscillations than for the P3 amplitude, the authors suggested that the ERO measures appeared to be superior to P3 amplitude in differentiating between high-risk and low-risk offspring, and may serve as more stable and useful endophenotypes in the study of alcoholism and related disorders. Hence, the results of these two studies [78,141] indicate that decreased theta and delta EROs to target stimuli may prove to be a strong phenotypic marker in the development of alcoholism,
