Sensitivity to punishment and reward omission: Evidence from error-related ERP components Maarten A.S. Boksem a,b, *, Mattie Tops c , Evelien Kostermans a , David De Cremer a,b a Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands b Centre for Justice and Social Decision Making, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands c Centre for Child and Family Studies, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands 1. Introduction The ability to seek out rewards is essential for survival: to reach its goals (stay alive), any organism should try to obtain rewards (e.g. food) and at the same time should try to avoid aversive consequences (e.g. injury or death). The approach of potential rewards and the avoidance of potential punishment are funda- mental to all goal directed behaviour: for something to constitute a goal, it has to be associated with a high value of predicted reward and low potential risk. From an evolutionary perspective, it is therefore not surprising that present day organisms are capable of estimating the expected reward value of various options and adjust these expectations continuously to the outcome of their choices. In the past decades, reinforcement learning (RL) theory has been developed to describe how organisms are able to acquire these reward expectancies and how the outcomes of choices can update these expectations (Barto and Sutton, 1997). In a typical RL model, the expected outcome of every decision option starts out with a certain value. Behavioural options that have a high expected value are preferred over options with lower expected values. Whenever the expected outcome differs from the actual outcome, this is coded as a reward prediction error. This error signal is then used to update the expected reward value of the chosen behavioural option so that it better reflects the observed reward value. The work of Schultz (Schultz et al., 1997; Schultz, 2002, 2004) suggests that these reward prediction errors are encoded in midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons. These neurons have been shown to respond with increased activity when outcomes are better than expected, while decreases in activity occur when outcomes are not as good as expected. Holroyd and Coles (2002) suggested that this negative RL error is conveyed to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), where it produces an error signal that can be measured as a negative event related potential (ERP) on the scalp, called the error-related negativity (ERN) or error negativity (Ne). Biological Psychology 79 (2008) 185–192 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 9 November 2007 Accepted 24 April 2008 Available online 3 May 2008 Keywords: Punishment Reward ERN Ne Pe BIS BAS Personality Motivation Engagement ABSTRACT In a recent experiment [Boksem, M.A.S., Tops, M., Wester, A.E., Meijman, T.F., Lorist, M.M., 2006. Error- related ERP components and individual differences in punishment and reward sensitivity. Brain Research 1101, 92–101], we showed that error-related ERP components were related to punishment and reward sensitivity. The present study was conducted to further evaluate the relationship between punishment/ reward sensitivity and these ERP components. Therefore, we scored our subjects on the BIS/BAS measures of punishment and reward sensitivity. Then, subjects performed one of two versions of a Flanker task: in one, they were financially punished for committing errors; in the other, they were financially rewarded for correct performance. Analyses of ERN/Ne amplitudes indicated significant interactions between personality measures of punishment (BIS) and reward (BAS) and actual punishment and reward, while analyses of Pe amplitudes showed significant interactions between personality measures of reward sensitivity and actual reward. We suggest that ERN/Ne amplitude is related to concerns over mistakes and depends on the level of aversion experienced by individual subjects for making these mistakes. Subjects that are highly sensitive to punishment are strongly motivated or engaged in avoiding punishment, while subjects sensitive to rewards are motivated to obtain rewards and therefore show high task engagement when rewards may be earned. The error-related ERP components appear to track this level of engagement in task performance. ß 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: Department of Social Psychology, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 13 4663390; fax: +31 13 4662067. E-mail address: maarten@boksem.nl (Maarten A.S. Boksem). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Biological Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biopsycho 0301-0511/$ – see front matter ß 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2008.04.010