The main goal of the present study is to examine reward/outcome processing in alcohol dependent individuals as compared to healthy controls while they subjectively experience monetary loss and gain during the performance of a gambling task. Since impulsivity is an important component of alcoholism as depicted both by models of disinhibition (Gorenstein and Newman, 1980; Begleiter and Porjesz, 1999; Krueger et al., 2002) as well as models of reward deficiency syndrome (Blum et al., 2000; Bowirrat and Oscar-Berman, 2005), we studied impulsivity in detail, both as a state measure (i.e. the task performance) and as a trait measure using Barratt impulsiveness scale (BIS) (Barratt, 1985; Patton et al., 1995). Although previous findings reported that ORN was localized to medial frontal areas (Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2004; Masaki et al., 2006), our earlier study using sLORETA (standardized low resolution electromagnetic tomography) (Pascual-Marqui, 2002) in healthy individuals showed that ORN during the loss conditions had a medial frontal source while the ORN for the gain conditions primarily had a medial posterior source (Kamarajan et al., 2009). Therefore, in the
