Recent imaging studies have examined the brain reward system in alcoholics and suggested that alcoholism may be a part of a spectrum of disorders subsumed under a Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS), as alcoholics showed abnormalities in the brain structures related to the reward network (Wrase et al., 2007; Makris et al., 2008; de Greck et al., 2009; Tanabe et al., 2009). ERP studies can further characterize the “millisecond-specific” brain dynamics of reward processing as well as deficiency in alcoholics. Although several ERP studies on reward processing (during monetary reward conditions) in healthy human subjects have been previously documented since the early 1980’s (e.g., Homberg et al., 1980, 1981; Begleiter et al., 1983; Otten et al., 1995; Ramsey and Finn, 1997; Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Yeung and Sanfey, 2004; Hajcak et al., 2006; Kamarajan et al., 2009), there have been very few ERP studies on the reward/outcome processing in individuals diagnosed with alcohol dependence. To our knowledge, there have been only two ERP studies carried out on alcoholics during reward processing. Probably the first study of this kind was done by
