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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.