Features of mothers’ emotional experience during the hospitalization of newborns in connection with hypoxic affection of the central nervous system

Abstract

Mothers of newborns with central nervous system pathology tend to experience more severe psychological distress and difficulty in forming a favourable relationship to their child than mothers of healthy infants. To provide psychological assistance, there is a need to better understand the features of the experience that parents find stressful and which ones are positive, in order to cope with stress. The objective of the research was to study mothers’ emotional experience during the hospitalization of newborns with hypoxic affection of the central nervous system (CNS). The research included 40 women admitted together with their children to the newborn pathology department: 22 mothers of full-term infants with hypoxic-ischemic injury (grade II and III), 18 mothers of preterm infants (29–34 weeks) with hypoxic-ischemic injury (grade II and III), intraventricular hemorrhage (grade II and III), and combined ischemic and hemorrhagic damage. Women responded to the questions of the original clinical-psychological interview and the data was processed qualitatively and quantitatively. The article describes the factors and content of negative and positive emotions of mothers in the period of hospitalization. The data on the contradictory nature of mothers’ reports of their feelings is presented: answers to direct questions are chiefly of a positive or ambivalent emotional background, while answers to projective questions primarily reflect a negative emotional background. It is shown that with a combination of prematurity and hypoxic affection of the child’s CNS, women have a more negative emotional background than that of the respondents who had delivered a full-term child. Conclusions are made about the effect of attitude on a “socially desirable” response during the description of the emotional experience, about less favorable emotional experience of mothers who delivered children prematurely with the pathology of the CNS.