Negative emotional responses to motherhood-related support receipt during pregnancy predict postpartum depressive symptoms

ABSTRACT

Background and Objectives: Prenatal stress increases risk for postpartum depression. While social support availability may attenuate this risk, little research has examined support receipt during pregnancy, which has been linked to increased distress in other domains. This study assesses the implications of motherhood-related and motherhood-unrelated support receipt for daily distress during pregnancy and tests whether negative responsiveness to motherhood-related support predicts postpartum depression risk. Design and Method: Thirty-one pregnant women were recruited from the community for a 3-wave study (beginning at approximately 26 weeks gestation, 34 weeks gestation, and 4 weeks postpartum). Each wave included a survey of general characteristics (e.g. depressive symptoms) and a two-week diary period measuring mood, stress, and support. Results: A multilevel model analysis suggested that motherhood-related support predicted greater increases in daily distress than motherhood-unrelated support. Follow-up regression analysis showed that those who responded more negatively to motherhood-related support reported higher postpartum depressive symptoms. Conclusions: Although preliminary due to the sample size, the results suggest that how women interpret and respond to support may contribute to postpartum depression risk. Future research should focus on how mothers can more positively construe the support they receive in addition to how to increase the support available to them.

KEYWORDS:

• Received social support
• pregnancy
• postpartum depression
• daily diary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christopher T. Burke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5383-4354

Notes

1 Cranford et al. (2006) note that there are several ways of conceptualizing a measure's reliability in a longitudinal design, since there are within-subject replications of each item over time. Drawing on Generalizability Theory (Cronbach, Gleser, Nanda, & Rajaratnam, 1972), they derived several indicators of reliability. They suggested that the measure of primary interest for many diary designs is the reliability with which true changes over time can be differentiated from noise. This is the indicator of reliability presented here. We used the VARCOMP procedure in SAS to obtain the variance components used in the calculation.