Learning from the emotional reaction of others is a crucial component in our everyday lives and monitoring one´s performance by observing emotions may be of particular relevance when task complexity is high. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether participants benefit from emotional feedback and to explore the underlying neural mechanisms by examining two event-related potentials (ERPs) - the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P3b. Participants completed a probabilistic learning task while their electroencephalogram was recorded. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the complexity of stimulus-response associations. Specifically, participants in the easy condition (n = 20) linked one object to one out of two possible responses and participants in the difficult condition (n = 22) linked one object to two out of four responses. Responses were followed by either emotional (happy; disgusted) or neutral (scrambled) faces. Participants´ accuracy rates increased over the course of the experiment, reflecting learning in all conditions. In contrast to our predictions, participants benefited from emotional feedback only in the easy condition. Regarding the ERPs, only the P3b was influenced by task difficulty, showing a frontal shift in the difficult condition. Interestingly, this is consistent with the idea of a frontal compensatory brain activity in aging research. These results might indicate that at least some cognitive capacity must be available to benefit from emotional feedback, even in younger adults. Potential effects of other emotional states and differences in processing feedback between younger and older adults will be addressed in future research.