A Study On Pregnant Women's Cognitive Vulnerability To Antenatal Depression

Postnatal depression has captured the attention of researchers, clinicians and lay public, but comparatively little is known about depression during pregnancy, for that pregnancy used to be regarded as a period during which women are relatively protected from psychiatric morbidity. However, accumulating evidence show that antenatal depression is more common than previously believed, and it should be paid more attention since antenatal psychological distress has also been shown to adversely affect fetal and maternal well-being. The prevalence and possible contributors of antenatal depression is the first interest of the study.Based on clinical studies on cognitive underpinning of depression, Beevers (2005) proposed a dual-process model of cognitive vulnerability to depression. According to the dual process perspective, it was assumed a cognitive vulnerability to depression involves the interplay between associative and reflective processing, with a negatively biased self-referent associative processing providing the foundation for a cognitive vulnerability to depression - that is, a person whose pattern completion mechanism is negatively biased when processing information about the self may be particularly susceptible to depression. We wandered if pregnant women with antenatal depression show a same kind of cognitive vulnerability.In order to investigate the prevalence and possible contributors of antenatal depression, serials of questionnaires were administering to more than 1000 pregnant women. Besides, such tasks as Stroop Test and n-back tasks were administering pregnant women scored high on depression scales, so as to test cognitive vulnerability assumption. The results showed that:1. The prevalence of antenatal depression was about 22.81% among the second and the third trimester in pregnancy.2. The following factors were the strongest predictors of antenatal depression: low levels of self-liking and self-competence of women, experiencing stressful life events during pregnancy, low levels of social support, etc.3. Women in pregnancy were vulnerable to emotional information.4. The assumption on dual-process model of cognitive vulnerability to antenatal depression was only partly supported in the study.