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Emotional feedback is a crucial part of social interaction, since it may indicate motivations, intentions, and thus, the future behavior of interaction partners. Nowadays, social interaction has been enriched by artificial emotional feedback provided by emojis, which are the means of transporting emotions in mobile messengers. In this study, we examined the influence of emotional feedback by emojis compared to real faces on decision-making and neural processing. We modified the ultimatum game by including proposers represented both by emojis and human faces who reacted specifically toward acceptance or rejection of an offer. We show that proposers who reward acceptance with a smile cause the highest acceptance rates. Interestingly, acceptance rates did not differ between proposers represented by humans compared to emojis. Regarding electrophysiology, emojis evoked more negative N170 and N2 brain potentials compared to human faces both during a mere presentation and as feedback stimuli. Proposers that showed emotional facial expressions evoked larger N170 amplitudes as compared to neutral expressions. Especially the proposers represented by emojis evoked larger P3 amplitudes as feedback stimuli compared to human facial expressions. The comparison of emoji proposers with real-face proposers provides new insight into how relevant social cues influence behavior and its neural underpinnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether greed would predict risky decision-making and recorded neural responses during a monetary gambling task using the electroencephalogram. We found that individuals high in trait-greed took higher risks to maximize monetary outcome. Furthermore, this relation was moderated by state-greed; specifically, trait-greed had a stronger impact on risky decision-making when activated by situational characteristics. On the neural level, greedy individuals showed a specific response to favorable and unfavorable outcomes. Specifically, they had a reduced feedback-related negativity-difference score to these events, indicating that they might have difficulty in learning from experience, especially from mistakes and negative feedback. It is concluded that greed may explain risky and reckless behavior in diverse settings, such as investment banking, and may account for phenomena such as stock market bubbles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]