Effects of Personality on Psychiatric and Somatic Symptoms in Pregnant Women

Abstract

The authors examined the effects of personality and pregnancy worries on pregnant women's mental and physical health with 154 women in the first half of their gestational period. Self-report questionnaires were used to collect information about control variables, sociodemographic (age, educational level, and work), and pregnancy variables (previous miscarriages, weeks of gestation, and planned pregnancy). Personality was measured using the NEO Five-Factor Inventory, pregnancy worries by the Cambridge Worry Scale, psychiatric clinical symptomatology using the Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R), and physical symptomatology with the Nausea and Vomiting in Pregnancy Instrument. Significant relations were observed between pregnancy worries, the traits of agreeableness and neuroticism, and all the SCL-90-R dimensions. The analyses revealed a direct effect of neuroticism and agreeableness on pregnancy worries. Pregnancy worries mediated the effects of both neuroticism and agreeableness on interpersonal sensitivity, hostility, and paranoid ideation. Worries were found not to have mediating effects between personality and somatic symptomatology. These results suggest that neuroticism exerts a negative effect on the psychological health of pregnant women, whereas agreeableness has a positive effect (both as a direct effect and as an indirect effect mediated by pregnancy worries). These findings have important practical implications regarding the planning of health care programs for pregnant women: Specifically, health professionals must take personality into account as a potential determinant of pregnant women's health, not only for the prevention of risks (in the case of neuroticism) but also for promoting health (in the case of agreeableness).

Predictive Importance of Antenatal Depressive Rumination and Worrying for Maternal–Foetal Attachment and Maternal Well-Being

“…It is possible that worries about the future (e.g., birth, dramatic changes in lifestyle) weigh more heavily on a pregnant woman's mind and thus are more likely to compromise her mental well-being than rumination about the past. It might be for this intuitively plausible reason that so (Biehle and Mickelson 2011;Gourounti et al 2012Gourounti et al , 2013Gourounti et al , 2014Gunning 2008;Lynn et al 2011;Maimburg et al 2013;Ö hman et al 2003;Petersen et al 2009;Puente et al 2011;Saastad et al 2012), rather than on rumination. Taken together, worrying and depressive rumination as two types of perseverative thinking predicted different outcomes (i.e., maternal well-being vs. maternal-foetal attachment) in the present study.…”

“…High social functioning, on the other hand, buffered the impact of rumination on depressive mood in this sample of pregnant women. Worries during pregnancy have been shown to be related to increased anxiety (Petersen et al 2009), depression, paranoid ideation, hostility (Puente et al 2011) as well as reduced well-being and relationship satisfaction (Biehle and Mickelson 2011).…”

Mixed Expectations: Effects of Goal Ambivalence during Pregnancy on Maternal Well-Being, Stress, and Coping

“…We also assessed a number of potential confounding factors in the postpartum questionnaire. Neuroticism is a personality trait that has been empirically related to decisional ambivalence about parenthood and avoidant coping (Pinquart et al., ) as well as perinatal distress (Puente, Monge, Abellan, & Morales, ) and depression (Bunevicius et al., ) and is therefore likely to explain variance in our study variables. We included the six‐item neuroticism subscale ( M = 7.38, SD = 4.16, α = .79) from the short version of the NEO‐Five‐Factor‐Inventory (Körner et al., ).…”

Partner support as a mediator of the relationship between prenatal concerns and psychological well-being in pregnant women

“…Though concerns, worry and anxiety are closely related constructs, they are distinguished by researchers. Anxiety is defined as a psychological and physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components, whereas concerns and worry are limited to the cognitive component of anxiety (see Puente, Monge, Abella'n, & Morales, 2011).…”