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How women experience pregnancy as uplifting or a hassle is related to their mental and physical health and birth outcomes. Pregnancy during a pandemic introduces new hassles, but may offer benefits that could affect how women perceive their pregnancy. Surveying 118 ethnically and racially diverse pregnant women, we explore (1) women’s traditional and pandemic-related pregnancy uplifts and hassles and (2) how these experiences of pregnancy relate to their feelings of loneliness, positivity, depression, and anxiety. Regressions show that women who experience more intense feelings of uplifts than hassles also feel more positive, less lonely, and have better mental health. Findings suggest that focusing on positive aspects of being pregnant, in general and during a pandemic, might be beneficial for pregnant women’s mental health.
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Lonely Individuals Process the World in Idiosyncratic Ways
Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by other people. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional MRI of 66 first-year university students to unobtrusively measure the relative alignment of people’s mental processing of naturalistic stimuli and tested whether lonely people actually process the world in idiosyncratic ways. We found evidence for such idiosyncrasy: Lonely individuals’ neural responses were dissimilar to those of their peers, particularly in regions of the default-mode network in which similar responses have been associated with shared perspectives and subjective understanding. These relationships persisted when we controlled for demographic similarities, objective social isolation, and individuals’ friendships with each other. Our findings raise the possibility that being surrounded by people who see the world differently from oneself, even if one is friends with them, may be a risk factor for loneliness.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1835239
- PAR ID:
- 10516059
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Psychological Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0956-7976
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 683 to 695
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221145316
