cns 2012 annual meeting news and updates chicago information has been posted meeting schedule available young investigator award winners announced slide sessions symposium sessions and poster assignments are now available distinguished career contributions award winner announced george a miller award winner announced advertising and exhibiting applications are now being taken meeting registration and hotel reservations are now open dates to watch march 12 last day to receive regular registration rate march 31 april 3 cns 2012 meeting in chicago poster h3 tuesday april 3 8 00 10 00 am 4th floor exhibit hall parametric depiction of early and late analysis of fear in various intensities an erp study emily forscher 1 david rozek 2 wen li 1 1 university of wisconsin-madison 2 university of notre dame in real life we experience threat in differing intensities ranging from a mild threat of confronting an unfriendly face to the extreme threat of facing death however a systemic investigation of human responses to varying levels of threat and their underlying neural mechanisms has not yet been performed here combining morphing techniques and brain electrophysiology we varied the percentage of fear information morphed into a neutral face from 2 to 45 in increments of 6 to parametrically delineate early and late analysis of threatening facial emotions and to associate threat processing with individual affective states participants’ fear detection rates across the levels conformed closely to a sigmoid function and the inflection point i e fear detection threshold correlated positively with positive affect increased positive affect reduced sensitivity to fear based on the detection threshold n170 at p7 revealed differential response to sub- and supra-threshold fearful faces t = 2 15 p = 0 05 late positive potentials 500-600 ms at pz exhibited a significant linear trend t= 3 12 p = 0 01 increasing in amplitude with incremental fear intensity therefore early visual responses largely classified these stimuli dichotically into fear” or no fear” categories while later visual analysis appeared to perform a parametric profiling of the amount of fear in the face these patterns conform to the well-established theories of early quick-and-dirty” processing and later elaborate analyses of emotion topic area emotion & social emotion-cognition interactions back