Several team members participated in the European Conference on Developmental Psychology (ECDP) in Turku, Finland, which took place from August 29 to September 1, 2023.
On the first day, Tuesday August 29 at 14:00, Cindy Eira Nunes presented her work on parents’ essentialist beliefs about parenthood and (co)parenting practices. Using a subsample of couples of parents from the SAFE-SORRY project, she explored the associations between mothers’ and fathers’ essentialist beliefs (e.g., the belief that women are naturally better fitted to parenthood than men) and their own and their partners’ need-supportive and need-frustrating parenting practices. She also investigated the relationship between these beliefs and coparenting support. You can download her presentation. In the same symposium, which is entitled “Educational strategies through the lens of psychological basic needs in several domains and across cultures”, Eliana De Salvo co-authored the study entitled “Teacher efficacy in inclusive practices: the role of needs satisfaction and mindfulness”. This study aimed to investigate the short-term longitudinal association between mindfulness, psychological basic needs satisfaction, and efficacy to implement inclusive practices in pre-service special education teachers. A symposium to check out on day one!
On Wednesday, you could go see the poster of Bénédicte Mouton, entitled “What a scary world for my kid!”, which presented a study about parents’ anxious beliefs about the world and climate change in relation to their overprotective parenting. It demonstrates that parents’ climate anxiety is not directly related to overprotection but is associated with threat beliefs which in turn are associated with overprotection, for both mothers and fathers. You can download her poster.
On the third day, Thursday 31 at 10:15, Louise Mathijs presented the results of a study she has been working on intensively over the last few months. Specifically, it involves a meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials of parenting interventions, and she wanted to answer the question whether group-based or individual programs are more effective, when considering the effects of a parenting intervention on the parents’ behaviors and mental health. You can download her presentation. Also on Thursday, at 16:15, Şule Selçuk presented the findings from a longitudinal cross-national study investigating different forms of parenting practices (solicitation, rule-setting, psychological control) as longitudinal predictors of adolescent disclosure and resistance to peer influence by focusing on the mediating role of adolescents’ perceptions of parental warmth, neglect, and overcontrol. The title of her presentation is “Parental Control, Adolescent Disclosure, and Resistance to Peer Influence: A Longitudinal Study across Individualistic and Collectivistic Countries.”
Finally, on the last day of the conference, Nino Skhirtladze presented the results of a published study which sought to identify parenting profiles, thereby relying upon adolescents’ perspectives and comparing a Georgian sample with a Belgian sample. You can download her presentation or read the published paper.
All in all, it was a very busy conference with for the SAFE-SORRY team, and an excellent occasion to meet some of our international colleagues (including Spyros Tantaros, the new president of the society – congratulations!).