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

ERP evidence for emotion-specific congruency effects between sentences and new words with disgust and sadness connotations

“…These results were possible because the methodology used in the learning session (see also Gu et al, 2021Gu et al, , 2022. Participants achieved high response accuracy in the within-and cross-modality tests, which suggests that rather than merely associating the new words with specific faces, they acquired the corresponding emotions expressed by those faces and were able to apply the new words to refer to new materials.…”

“…(1) Sad new words will elicit larger EPN amplitudes than disgusting new words based on our previous study (Gu et al, 2022).…”

“…Following the procedures implemented by Gu et al (2022), the learning session consisted of a training phase, an evaluation phase, and a generalization phase. During the training phase, each trial began with a fixation cross at the center of the screen for 1,000 ms, followed by a sole presentation of the face of 1,000 ms, and then the pseudoword presented in Times New Roman font and size 50 on top of the face for 5,000 ms.…”

“…Illustration of the last frame of trials employed in the learning phase, the evaluation phase, and the generalization phase. The procedures are explained in the text and in Gu et al (2022). The English translation of the sentence in the figure is "A dog pisses on your leg".…”

“…To these aims, the study was divided into a learning session and an ERP recording session. In the learning session, an associative learning paradigm used in our previous studies (Gu et al, 2021(Gu et al, , 2022) was adopted for participants to acquire disgusting and sad connotations for pseudowords through repeatedly pairing them with emotional faces. Then the ERP session was carried out on the next day, in which all the pseudowords with acquired emotional connotations (herein new words) were paired with disgusting and sad sentences.…”