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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on January 11, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(11):2526-2535; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl158
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Cognitive Coping Style Modulates Neural Responses to Emotional Faces in Healthy Humans: A 3-T fMRI Study

Astrid Veronika Rauch1, Patricia Ohrmann1, Jochen Bauer1, Harald Kugel2, Almut Engelien3, Volker Arolt1, Walter Heindel2 and Thomas Suslow1

1 Department of Psychiatry, University of Münster, Germany, 2 Department of Clinical Radiology, University of Münster, Germany, 3 IZKF Group 4, Department of Psychiatry and IZKF Münster, University of Münster, Germany

Address correspondence to Thomas Suslow, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Münster, Albert-Schweitzer-Str. 11, 48149 Münster, Germany. Email: Thomas.Suslow{at}ukmuenster.de.

Repression designates coping strategies that aim to shield the organism from distressing stimuli by disregarding their aversive characteristics. In contrast, sensitization comprises coping strategies that are employed to reduce situational uncertainty such as analyzing the environment. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to study neural correlates of coping styles during the perception of threatening and nonthreatening socially relevant information. Pictures of human faces bearing fearful (ambiguously threatening), angry (unambiguously threatening), happy (nonthreatening), and neutral expressions were presented masked and unmasked. Two groups of subjects were examined who were defined as consistent repressors versus consistent sensitizers with the Mainz Coping Inventory. Sensitizers tended to exhibit stronger neural responses in the amygdala to unmasked fearful faces compared with repressors. Overall, repressors were cortically more responsive to fearful (ambiguously threatening) and happy (nonthreatening) facial expressions than sensitizers, whereas sensitizers presented an enhanced responsivity to angry faces in several prefrontal areas, that is, unambiguously threatening expressions. Results from time series analyses suggest that sensitizers could exhibit less top-down cortical regulation of the amygdala than repressors in the processing of fearful faces. An increased responsivity of the amygdala to ambiguously threatening stimuli may represent a biological determinant of sensitizers' feelings of uncertainty.

Key Words: facial expression • fear • repression • sensitization • threat processing


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