From the 5th to the 8th of July 2024, Cindy Eira Nunes will represent the SAFE-SORRY team across the Atlantic! She will take part in the 2024 conference of the International Association for Relationship Research in Boston, USA.

On Sunday, July 7 at 10:30 am, Cindy will present her work on the relational mechanisms underlying persisting inequalities between mothers’ and fathers’ involvement towards their children. Using cross-lagged models on longitudinal dyadic data, she looked at the mutual influences between mothers’ gender essentialist beliefs (e.g., the belief that women are naturally better fitted to parenthood than men) and fathers’ parental involvement (i.e., in terms of responsiveness, autonomy support, overprotection, and controlling parenting). She particularly tested two potential relational mechanisms: maternal gatekeeping hypothesis (i.e., mothers beliefs elicit maternal gatekeeping which in turn discourage father’s quality involvement) and the cognitive dissonance hypothesis (i.e., father’s lower quality involvement lead mothers to endorse more essentialist beliefs). You can find her presentation here.