2 - (SYM 31) Rigid Maternal Body Beliefs, Self-compassion, and Perinatal Depression

Background: As 20% of women may experience postpartum depression, it is important to identify risk factors that can be modified during the perinatal period. One cognitive risk factor for perinatal depression is the endorsement of dysfunctional attitudes about motherhood (e.g., Leach et al., 2017; Sockol et al., 2015). Previous studies have focused on attitudes about maternal competence and role idealization. Although these attitudes are important, a host of problematic judgements about the maternal body are often expressed clinically and, thus, should also be considered. These include idealistic and often unattainable beliefs about “natural” or controllable conception, delivery, breastfeeding, and the perinatal body (Krause et al., 2022). Therefore, one aim of the current study was to examine the impact of maternal body beliefs on perinatal depression over and above dysfunctional attitudes about motherhood. A second aim was to examine self-compassion as a possible moderator of the impact of maternal body beliefs. We hypothesized that maternal body beliefs would predict perinatal depression especially for women with a tendency to judge themselves harshly (i.e., low self-compassion).

Methods: One hundred and fifty-nine (119 pregnant and 40 postpartum) women, completed questionnaires online, including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS; Cox et al., 1987), the Maternal Body Beliefs Scale (MBBS; Krause et al., 2022), the Pregnancy Related Beliefs Scale (PRBQ; Leach et al., 2017), and the Self Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff, 2003). Correlations indicated that parity, income, and past emotional issues were associated (all ps < .01) with both the MBBS (rs = -.23, -.51, .47, respectively) and the EPDS (rs = -.23, -.38, .27, respectively), and thus were included as covariates in analyses.

Results: Regression models revealed that after controlling for covariates, the MBBS (β = .24, p < .05) predicted perinatal depression over and above the significant, unique effects of the PRBQ (β = .26, p < .01) and the SCS (β = -.20, p < .01). There was no moderating effect of self-compassion.

Conclusion: Results highlight modifiable cognitive vulnerability factors for perinatal depression that may be important to address during pregnancy and postpartum. These include dysfunctional beliefs about motherhood, rigid maternal body beliefs, and low self-compassion. While these findings are correlational, we are in the process of collecting follow-up data to evaluate the impact of these cognitive vulnerabilities on postpartum depression prospectively.