Peer Review History
Original SubmissionMay 7, 2020 |
---|
PONE-D-20-13551 Maternal-Fetal Bonding among Pregnant Women at Psychosocial Risk: The Roles of Adult Attachment Style, Prenatal Parental Reflective Functioning, and Depressive Symptoms PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rohder, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. In particular, please consider commenting on the selection of the study sample which excluded participants based on what many researchers would consider to be key at-risk characteristics, i.e. poor language skills and children in care. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 02 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Christine E East Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. 3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information 4. Please include a separate caption for each figure in your manuscript. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. Rohder and colleagues report findings from their study which examined psychosocial correlates of maternal-fetal bonding amongst at-risk pregnant women. This manuscript contributes new evidence to the field as well as important implications for future perinatal screening and intervention. I do have some suggestions for the paper. Abstract - The study design should be mentioned in the abstract -Line 24: The sentence starting “The study aim was to study…” Consider the double use of the word ‘study’. -Line 35: Please present the key findings from this study in numerical form. - Please include the main limitation of the study in the last paragraph of the abstract. Introduction: -Overall, the introduction is well-written and comprehensive, however the authors could condense much of this background information, particularly when discussing past research findings and the Maternal Antenatal Attachment Scale. I think the focus could instead be on the parts of the introduction which explain why this study is important, the new information it offers to the field and the justification of the methodological decisions the authors have made. -Second paragraph of the introduction: the authors talk about emotional well-being and emotional distress during pregnancy but I think it is worthwhile to expand upon this. More specifically, how the perinatal period brings about an increased vulnerability for women for both the onset and recurrence of mental illnesses such as depression. Perinatal depression is highly relevant to this study and to the topic of mother-fetal bonding so it deserves a point of discussion here in the introduction. Method Overall this section is clear and well written. I have a few suggestions for improvement below. - More information on the setting and location of the study would assist readers, especially those unfamiliar with locations in Denmark and the Danish health system. As this was a study recruiting at-risk women, were the locations of these hospitals in areas with high social disadvantage and at-risk populations? - Line 252: The authors state that risk status was defined by the official Danish Health Care recommendations whereby GPs or midwives identify pregnant women at risk based on known mental health history. How does this information come to be “known”? Is it based on self-report by the woman at time of appointment, health records, or is there some sort of standard mental health screening or psychosocial questionnaire that takes places for women in the health service as part of their pregnancy care? - Line 256: Considering this study is examining at-risk women, I think it would be beneficial to the reader to offer more details of the criteria for being deemed at-risk. It mentions in the paper severe social vulnerabilities such as limited social network or partner with severe mental illness. What other social vulnerabilities were considered eligible? - Line 258: I have some concerns with the exclusion criteria. Firstly, it states that those unable to speak or understand Danish were excluded, as well as those who had a previous child placed in care. Both of these factors would be highly prevalent among at-risk women and I am therefore concerned that this study may have excluded a good part of its targeted population and introduced bias which could affect the generalisability of the results. Can the authors offer more of a strong rationale and justification for this perplexing exclusion criteria? This also needs to be discussed in the limitation section of the discussion. It may offer an explanation as to why characteristics of the participants appear to be functioning at a higher level (relationships, educated, and employed) than to be expected for an at-risk population. - What were the professional backgrounds of the researchers who contacted the women by phone and conducted the home assessments? Was any training undertaken for the researchers in order to administer the measures? - On average how long did each home interview take? - Line 275: The authors mention that 61 women chose not to participate for reasons of not needing extra intervention, lack of energy, and not wanting to be video recorded. Can you provide the specific number breakdown for each of these reasons? As a reader, I am particularly interested in how many declined due to not wanting to be video recorded. I am also unsure as to the exact reason why the women participating in the study were to be video recorded, can the authors please provide further explanation. - It could be worthwhile to use headings for each of the measure administered in this study. It will assist the reader to quickly identify the measures used. -Line 325: When discussing the details of the EPDS, there is no mention of the items which assess symptoms of anxiety, the resulting anxiety subscale score, as well as question 10 which assesses self-harm. I think this needs to be mentioned and included in the results. If the authors, choose not to do this then a justification needs to be provided as to why this data is not reported. - Line 326 Please give specific details on the performance (high sensitivity and specificity) for the EPDS. - Line 329 Should read “cut off point” not cut point - Line 329 The description of the meaning of the cut off point needs to be clearer. The cut off points are applied to indicate the possibility of risk for probable depression not just the presence of depressive symptoms. - Was a power analysis conducted prior to the study? Are you able to explain how the study size was arrived at? - Line 337: Can the authors please explain their choices for controlled variables and expand upon the reasons as to why these variables may confound the results? Results - Line 349: Can the authors report the results from the EPDS administration which includes the anxiety subscale. It would be of note to add how many women scored 1 or higher on question 10. - Table 1: In the heading of table 1 please state the number of participants to show there was no missing data for these questions. - Table 3: In this table the study results are presented in the format of n (%) but the normative data is not presented in the same format. I am assuming it is percentages presented for the normative data? This needs more clarification, if possible present both the n and % of the normative data. Discussion - Line 505: There are some issues with the generalizability of the results and this should be discussed in the limitation section. The authors state that unmeasured differences between women who chose to participate and those who declined participation limit the generalizability of the findings. It should be stated in addition, that the study did have a high non-participation rate. Perhaps as a result of the study’s methodology which involved video recording of participants, a somewhat intrusive choice of data collection and not yet justified by the authors in this current manuscript. -The other limitation which must be addressed is the selection of the study sample which excluded participants based on what many researchers would consider to be key at-risk characteristics, i.e. poor language skills and children in care. The authors need to reflect upon this and offer more of a discussion on how this ultimately affects their results. Given all of the above, this paper makes some important recommendations regarding the future of prenatal screening and opportunities for intervention to improve parenting practices and ultimately mother-child outcomes. However, this paper needs major revisions but could still be a helpful publication if strengthened. ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.
|
Revision 1 |
Maternal-Fetal Bonding among Pregnant Women at Psychosocial Risk: The Roles of Adult Attachment Style, Prenatal Parental Reflective Functioning, and Depressive Symptoms PONE-D-20-13551R1 Dear Dr. Rohder, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Christine E East Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-13551R1 Maternal-Fetal Bonding among Pregnant Women at Psychosocial Risk: The Roles of Adult Attachment Style, Prenatal Parental Reflective Functioning, and Depressive Symptoms Dear Dr. Røhder: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Christine E East Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
Open letter on the publication of peer review reports
PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.
We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.
Learn more at ASAPbio .