The effect of antenatal mindfulness-based character strength training on women’s thriving

Given the importance of maternal psychological well-being, it is necessary to effectively examine appropriate interventions designed for this transitional period of women’s life. Applications of positive psychology interventions have recently been explored and appear to be effective in this period, yet this is the first time we are presenting mindfulness-based character strength training in perinatal period.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Strengths Practice (MBSP) on the factors of well-being by the end of pregnancy and after childbirth.

The present study was quasi-experimental with pretest, posttest, and follow-up and control group design. The research population included the pregnant women in Tehran at the 6th and 7th months of pregnancy available on the Instagram and telegram pages of 5 gynecologists. For this purpose 60 pregnant women were selected via internet based on the voluntary sampling procedure and then randomly assigned to experimental and control group (30 women in each group). The study instruments were the “comprehensive Inventory of Thriving” (Su, Tay, DienerT 2014), the “Values In Action” (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and the “Mindfulness-Based Strength Practice in pregnancy” (Niemec, 2014 & Bardak, 2010). Experimental group participated in 8 training sessions of 2 hours. The control group received the ordinary guidelines for pregnancy. By the end of the training sessions, both groups participated in posttest and the follow-up test occurred one month after the childbirth. Data was analyzed by multivariate repeated measures analysis of variance.

The results showed significant improvement in all subscales in the experimental group (p<0.01), and this improvement was still significant in the follow-up test (p<0.01).

The Mindfulness-Based Strengths Practice can be an efficient training in the transitional period of pregnancy and after childbirth.