Assessing prenatal attachment in a sample of Italian women

Assessing prenatal attachment in a sample of Italian women. The term prenatal attachment refers to the affective investment that parents develop towards the unborn baby during the gestation period. Recent research supports the idea that the early relationship between the woman and the child she’s bearing is related to the quality of postnatal mother–infant interaction and to the improvement of the woman’s health behaviour in pregnancy. This study focuses on the process of the woman’s bonding with her foetus and aims to assess the psychometric properties of the Italian translation of Prenatal Attachment Inventory (PAI). The PAI was translated into Italian and administered to a sample of 214 low-risk pregnant women. As prenatal attachment is supposed to measure the mother’s capability to emotionally invest in the foetus, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale was also administered to assess the pregnant women’s alexithymia level. The results illustrate that the Italian version of the PAI maintains the main psychometric characteristics of the original version. Explorative factor analysis suggested a five-factor structure. The association between low level prenatal attachment and high level alexithymia may be of interest in mother–infant wellbeing promotion programmes. Keywords: attachment theory; alexithymia; prenatal attachment inventory