Psychological aspects of infertility. Research review

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a research review about psychological aspects of infertility. In the first part medical understanding of infertility is explained. Next, research works on self-esteem, stress, and personality and their associations with infertility are shown. The following part shows infertility in the perspective of partner relationships. In the last part gender differences in the experience of infertility shown in research data are presented. In the conclusion, we show some important methodological problems which exist in the literature on infertility and its psychological aspects. We also give some recommendations to overcome these problems.