Schacht, A. 1 , Adler, N. 2 , Guo, T. 3 & Sommer, W. 2
1 CRC Text Structures, University of Göttingen, Germany
2 Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
3 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, China
Emotional pictures, faces, or words elicit an early posterior negativity (EPN) in the event-related potential, starting around 200 to 400 ms, followed by a late positive complex (LPC). Occasionally, also very early effects of emotion (VEEEs) are seen between 50 and 150 ms. The present study examined whether VEEEs can be due to direct links established by reinforcement learning. In the learning session, participants learned to associate previously unknown Chinese words with monetary gain, loss, or neither. In the test session, they were required to distinguish the learned stimuli from novel distracters. Specific to stimuli associated with positive outcome a VEEE was observed around 150 ms and an LPC between 550 and 700 ms, whereas an EPN was absent. These results show that monetary gain can induce VEEEs, indicating that emotion effects in ERPs may come about in the absence of biologically preparedness and semantic meaning, merely by previous association with reward.