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Emotion is usually not discussed as a relevant variable in rational models of decision making—but may be one. The present electroencephalographic study demonstrates the influence of emotional primes (angry, happy faces) on purchase decisions. In a within-subject design, pictures of an apartment were shown to participants who then had to make Go/NoGo decisions on whether to rent it. Their decision should be based either on its price or on its brightness. In two thirds of the trials, emotional prime pictures of happy versus unhappy faces preceded the purchase target (apartment); in one third of the trials no prime was given. Response certainty was evaluated by means of reaction times (RT) and peak amplitude of the event-related potential N200. Facial primes accelerated decisions (RT) irrespective of affective expression. Positive face primes elicited larger N200 amplitudes during purchase decision compared to negative ones. Price-based decisions were made faster and elicited larger N200 than brightnessbased decisions. These results support the cognitive-tuning model of decision making and validate the N200 as sensitive measure for the interplay of cognitive and affective aspects in decision making.

The authors tested whether individually tailored health communications receive more attention from the reader than nontailored health communications in a randomized, controlled trial among student volunteers (N = 24). They used objective measures of attention allocation during the message exposure. In a between-subjects design, participants had to read tailored or nontailored nutrition education messages and at the same time had to pay attention to specific odd auditory stimuli in a sequence of frequent auditory stimuli (odd ball paradigm). The amount of attention allocation was measured by recording event-related potentials (ERPs; i.e., N100 and P300 ERPs) and reaction times. For the tailored as opposed to the nontailored group, results revealed larger amplitudes for the N 100 effect, smaller amplitudes for the P300 effect, and slower reaction times. Resource allocation theory and these results suggest that those in the tailored group allocated more attention resources to the nutrition message than those in the nontailored group.