Beltrán Guerrero, DavidTaylor & Francis2025-01-242025-01-242022-07-18Gu, B., Liu, B., Wang, H., de Vega, M., & Beltrán, D. (2022). ERP signatures of pseudowords’ acquired emotional connotations of disgust and sadness. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38(10), 1348–1364. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2099914.ISSN: 2327-3801https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2099914https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/25491This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in "Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38(10), 1348–1364", available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2099914.The present study investigated how two negative acquired emotional connotations, disgust and sadness, affect the neural activity in word processing. Participants completed a learning session in which pseudowords were paired with faces showing disgusted, sad, and neutral expressions, followed by an event-related potential (ERP) recording session on the next day involving a lexical-semantic decision task. ERP results revealed that sad pseudowords reduced the early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitudes compared to disgusting and neutral pseudowords in the early time window whereas disgusting pseudowords reduced the late positive component (LPC) amplitudes compared to neutral pseudowords. Importantly, the source localization in the EPN time window clearly dissociated the three emotional conditions: disgusting pseudowords elicited the largest activation in the right insular cortex, sad pseudowords elicited more activity in the right anterior cingulate cortex, and neutral pseudowords increased activation in the occipital lobe. These results suggested that faces are effective sources for the acquisition of words’ emotional connotations, revealing corresponding distinctive neural signatures.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess24 Ciencias de la Vida::2490 NeurocienciasartículodisgustsadnesspseudowordsfacesERPs