an ERP study in adolescents and young adult offspring from alcoholic families (HR, high risk to develop alcoholism who had at least one parent with alcohol dependence) and found that adolescent females and young adult males showed reduced P3 amplitudes during the loss conditions [67] but no difference in the gain conditions compared to low risk offspring from control families (LR) who had no parental history of alcoholism. It is surprising that very few studies have examined the reward related ERP components (ORN and ORP) as well as the theta EROs underlying these components in the realm of alcoholism [24,25,49,67]. Further, reward related theta oscillations, a primarily constituent of these ERP components, have not yet been studied in high risk offspring of alcoholics, while this measure has been explored in normal subjects [14,30,39,43,44] and alcoholics [49] during reward processing.
