Emotions and factors like cognition and attention shape the pain experience in a context-dependent way. Our aim was to assess the relationship between anxiety and perceived pain-intensity, and to investigate the contribution of anxiety to stimulus and peri-stimulus changes in brain activation induced by experimental heat pain. Employing a block design, we acquired fMRI data from 12 healthy volunteers that were given cutaneous painful heat stimuli. Stimulus-related pain intensity was rated retrospectively on a 0-10 VAS scale. The Anxiety Scale raw scores of the Brief Symptom Inventory® (Pearson Assessments) were introduced as a co-variate of interest in the fMRI analysis (FSL, Oxford Centre for fMRI of the Brain, Software Library). Psychophysical/-metric analyses revealed that anxiety was negatively correlated with perceived pain intensity (r = -0.69, p = 0.01). FMRI analyses indicated that the stimulus- and the pre- and post-stimulus periods exhibited typical pain-related activation/deactivation patterns. Anxiety-related activation was only detected in the left (contralateral) middle temporal gyrus (MTG) (Brodmann's area 21)/temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and was only present during painful stimulation and not during the peri-stimulus periods. No anxiety-related deactivations could be identified. Apart from its main functions in auditory/language and associative processing, the anxiety-activated right temporal area has been implicated in mood disorders and as a detector of changes in the sensory environment. Our preliminary results suggest a role of MTG/TPJ in an up-regulated awareness of dynamic sensory changes in anxious subjects, resulting in activation of antinociceptive systems.