ERP signatures of pseudowords’ acquired emotional connotations of disgust and sadness

The present study investigated how acquired disgusting and sad connotations affect 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 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 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 acquiring words’ emotional connotations, revealing corresponding distinctive neural signatures.