Background and Aims:
Stress is omnipresent and a major source of mental health problems. Using an effective coping strategy is important for overcoming stress related issues. Preferred usage of a coping strategy can be reflected in objective cognitive measures. To relate the individual choice of a stress coping strategy to objective cognitive indicators of emotional faces processing in working memory.

Methods:
N = 60 (44 female, mean age 27±7 years). The participants completed a Russian version of the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), which identifies three coping strategies: task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidant. The participants also completed a version of the Internal Shift Task (IST) with emotional and neutral faces as stimuli. The IST is a working memory updating task, where the subjects have to mentally count the male and female, or angry or neutral faces presented randomly. Reaction time while going from one face to the other was collected (IST is self-paced).

Results:
Pearson’s  correlations revealed that processing time for angry faces was negatively related to avoidant coping (specifically, to social distraction, r=-0.52, p<0.01), but only when processing emotional information was in the focus of attention (p>0.1 in the gender processing condition). It was also found that processing time for neutral stimuli was positively related to task-oriented coping (r=+0.38, p<0.05) indicating a more thorough cognitive processing in the task-oriented coping strategy.

Conclusions:
Quick abandonment of angry faces processing and slowed processing of neutral stimuli can be used as objective indicators of coping strategies in pathology and normal population.

EMOTIONAL FACES PROCESSING IN WORKING MEMORY RELATED TO COPING STRATEGIES