Comments: "Are smartphones a tool to cope with the fear of childbirth? The correlation between the fear of loss of connection and the fear of childbirth".

Every individual harbors at least one untold secret within themselves, which makes keeping secrets an everyday routine [,]. Not only do the subjects and contents of individuals’ secrets vary from person to person, but substantial individual differences also exist in their inclination to conceal or disclose such information [,]. Self-concealment is one critical type of those individual differences, which is defined as the inherent predisposition to actively withhold from others personal information that one appraises as distressing or negatively valenced []. Self-concealment has received substantial scholarly attention because it has been associated with physical health problems [,], interpersonal difficulties [,], and psychological maladjustment []. The working model of self-concealment [] proposes that withholding distressing personal information may interfere with support seeking and emotional regulation. Consistent with this account, previous studies have reported positive associations between self-concealment and depression [], anxiety [], stress [], and posttraumatic stress symptoms [,,]. Self-concealment has also been associated with non-suicidal self-injury [,,], suicidality [,,,,], alcohol-related problems [,], substance misuse [], disordered eating [,,], and several problematic digital behaviors [,,,,]. The Self-Concealment Scale (SCS) is the most widely used instrument for assessing self-concealment []. The original English-language SCS [] has been translated and used in German [], Japanese [], Chinese [], Turkish [], Portuguese [], and Spanish [,,] language contexts. Across these settings, internal consistency estimates have generally been acceptable: an integrative review of 99 studies reported a mean coefficient alpha of 0.87 [], and individual validation studies reported alpha coefficients of 0.80-0.866 [,,,,,] and omega of 0.85 []. Evidence for other forms of validity has varied across studies and remains context dependent.