## 4 Discussion
In other words, they favour the idea that motivational tendencies during reward feedback are mainly reflecting aversion related to reward omission rather than appetitive responses in case of a gain. In their experiment, the largest startle reflex potentiation occurred in cases of the largest reward omission. These results are interesting in the context of the so-called prospect theory; see [1]. However, it should be emphasised that the largest possible amount to win was only USD 0.20. Nevertheless, while the nature of this experiment is fundamentally different to the one in our study, because their study did not include any decision making, it is nevertheless worthwhile to follow the idea that aversion plays a more crucial role than positive aspects of a stimulus, maybe in particular when stimuli are of monetary nature. However, similar results were found for facial expressions as stimuli. However, knowing that facial expression stimuli are usually fake (pictures were taken in the absence of true respective feelings behind the faces), these results have to be treated with great caution [21]. In the present study, no baseline responses were collected, and it is thus not possible to infer any absolute points on the appetitive/aversive continuum. However, the relative response differences between the scenarios \"gain\", \"stable\" and \"crash\" show a clear pattern and, crucially, manipulations of eye blink responses collected in the present study indeed reflect affection during financial decision making related to varying scenarios of asset price developments. Participants had to decide whether to buy or sell distinct assets for all three scenarios. Leaving out the \"exposure\" factor (i.e., percent prior investment), the smallest mean startle response occurred for \"gain\" scenarios that were mostly associated with sell decisions instead of buy decisions. Even though actual decisions were not analysed (i.e., not taken into account), this reflects either the most appetitive or least aversive affective responses in case of positive asset price developments that mean monetary gain. \"Crash\" scenarios elicited the largest eye blink responses to the constant startle probes, which is interpreted as being associated with most aversive affective states (or least appetite). This makes sense if one imagines an asset manager sitting in front of a \"crash\" scenario (appearing on a monitor) that always reflects monetary loss. There is the option to further invest, because of a low price (buy), which is risky (the asset price could further lose), or to sell with the motivation to avoid even more damage, which is also risky because the asset price could go up. Such risky decision making seems obviously more aversive in comparison to deciding to further buy or sell in case of \"gain\" scenarios. According to the above-mentioned prospect theory [1], humans are risk averse in the context of gains and risk seeking in case of losses, which is interesting in the context of the current findings. If one sells too early (selling is the major decision for \"gain\" scenarios) in case of a positive price development, this only means that more profit could have been made. Even though in both cases risk aversion seems to be involved, the present results show that \"crash\" scenarios definitely elicit more aversive affection than \"gain\" scenarios. In other words, decision making related to the task to minimise loss is more aversive than decision making related to the task to maximise gain, at least in situations with uncontrolled future happenings (like for financial markets). Across both exposure conditions (i.e., percent of prior investment), the \"stable\" value scenario elicited eye blink responses between both of the other two scenarios. In summary, the pattern of results mirrors respective expectations and makes perfect sense. This, however, takes on another perspective when considering the percent of prior investment (i.e., \"exposure\").