EXPLORING THE COMPLEXITY OF MATERNITY EXPERIENCE BASED ON THE DERIVED RELATIONAL LEARNING HISTORY

• Grant number: 23/18044-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2024
• End date: April 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: João Henrique de Almeida
• Grantee: Raquel Scaneiro Emerique
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências (FC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The experience of motherhood, especially in the early years, represents a period of remarkable vulnerability in women's lives, characterized by physical, hormonal, psychological, and social role changes. The high incidence of anxiety and depression disorders during pregnancy and postpartum highlights the importance of understanding the challenges faced by mothers. This project aims to explore a behavioral perspective on social constructions surrounding the role of motherhood and how these constructions can impact women's mental health. Thirty university students, divided into mothers and non-mothers, from a university in the interior of São Paulo, will participate in the study. Using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), participants will undergo tasks assessing their rapid responses to the concepts of the "ideal mother" and the "unfit mother." The experiment seeks to investigate the sensitivity of the IRAP to possible social biases related to implicit beliefs about motherhood. Data analysis will focus on participants' latencies, transformed into D-IRAP scores. An evaluation of the individual effects of each type of IRAP trial will be conducted through a t-test, followed by an ANOVA to consider the overall impact of trial types, exploring the effect size through ·2Partial. The project aims to contribute to the understanding of social stigmas associated with motherhood, potentially informing future interventions focused on the mental health of women during the maternal period.