A few limitations of this study need to be considered. First, all assessments on life events were done using retrospective self report checklists, which may be prone to recall bias. People with mental health problems tend to over - report the number and severity of stressors that they have experienced (Grant et a 2006). We used the number of life events and not the perceived severity to minimise this potential bias. Further, the test-retest reliability for neither anxiety nor depression was tested, as it was expected to be low due to the transitory nature of state. Likewise the EPDS is also a measure of state rather than trait. Second, current affective state might influence the assessment of personality (Klein et al., 2010). However, when we excluded women with moderate to high levels of anxiety or depression at baseline, results were similar. Third, the items measuring neuroticism in the NEO-FFI and the items of the EPDS are alike, which might have inflated the associations between depression and personality traits (Klein et al., 2010). However, the time frames of both measurements differ: EPDS measures state ('how do you feel at this moment) whereas NEO-FFI measures trait (how do you usually feel Finally, although we observed increasing anxiety and depression associated with life events, mean scores remained below the cutoff value for subclinical and clinical disorders. Therefore our results are not necessarily applicable to pregnant women with anxiety or depressive disorders. Moreover, as we did not have information on clinical diagnoses of the women in our sample, we could not compare our findings of screen-positives with women with actual clinical disorders. Related to this, we reported pre valence rates of being screen-positive using a relatively low cut-off value of 12 or more on the EPDS which corresponds to an increased risk of minor or major depression It is known that prevalence rates of increased risk of depression are substantially influenced by the actual cut-off value chosen (Matthey et al 2006). Nevertheless, having subthreshold symptoms of depression is a risk factor for developing a clinical disorder as convincingly shown in a systematic literature review (Cuijpers and Smit, 2004).