Valence-specific conflict moderation in the dorso-medial PFC and the caudate head in emotional speech Abbreviated title: Conflict in emotional speech

Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Denise Scheermann for recruiting participants and conducting the measurements, as well as all the participants of this study for their motivation. Abstract Emotional speech comprises of complex multimodal verbal and non-verbal information that allows deducting others' emotional states or thoughts in social interactions. While the neural correlates of verbal and non-verbal aspects and their interaction in emotional speech have been identified, there is very little evidence on how we perceive and resolve incongruity in emotional speech, and whether such incongruity extends to current concepts of task-specific prediction errors as a consequence of unexpected action outcomes (" negative surprise "). Here we explored this possibility while participants listened to congruent and incongruent angry, happy, or neutral utterances and categorized the expressed emotions by their verbal (semantic) content. Results reveal valence-specific incongruity effects: negative verbal content expressed