Emotional Touchpoints and Emotions of Childbirth: A Systematic Mixed Studies Review and Epistemic Network Analysis.

Abstract

Background: Emotional touchpoints are moments during perinatal care that evoke an emotional response in a woman. There is a lack of knowledge regarding the centrality of how touchpoints and emotions are framed in the real-life experiences of childbearing women.

Aim: To explore how birth-related emotional touchpoints interact and how the emotions in the context of these healthcare experiences interact.

Methods: We performed a systematic mixed studies review to capture childbearing women's prospective and retrospective reports of birth expectations and experiences. We conducted a literature search in CINAHL (EBSCO), Medline (EBSCO), PubMed, Web of Science, and Ovid, followed by hand searching and forward and backward citation searching from the included articles. We performed a quality appraisal using the Critical Appraisal Skills Program. We used Epistemic Network Analysis to model and visualize the connections and structure of the emotional touchpoints and the emotions.

Results: We included 28 articles, showing overall moderate quality. We constructed two models, one of emotional touchpoints and one of emotions. The emotional touchpoints model showed a strong connection between Coping and the Process of Labor & Birth and between the Process of Labor & Birth and Beliefs (belief systems) about Labor & Birth. The primary emotions model showed strong connections between Joy and Fear, between Fear and Sadness and between Sadness and Joy.

Conclusions: This paper illustrates how the multidimensionality of birth-related emotional touchpoints and the positive and negative emotions prospectively and retrospectively reported by pregnant and postpartum women were distilled-informing the conversation between care providers and childbearing women.