Joana Lara Soares

Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Porto, Portugal · Group for Research and Intervention on Adoption and Out-of-Home Care - Centre for Psychology of Development and Child Education

Background According to the DSM-5, attachment disorders can be categorized as two distinct types: Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) and Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder (DSED). The literature has suggested that children who have experienced emotional and social care deprivation tend to show signs of these disorders. Thus, attachment is a ce...

In recent years, adoption research has been paying increased attention to the lived experience of adoption, mainly from the adoptees’ perspective. This study considers the adoption experience as lived by the adoptive parents. Also, typically, parent-child influences have been described following the cascade metaphor, with downstream influences from...

There are several motives underlying the process of deciding to become an adoptive family. However, research exploring this issue is scarce and essentially focused on infertility as the main motivation. The present mixed‐method study aims to fill in this gap by exploring, retrospectively, the motives to adopt of 126 Portuguese adoptive parents. The...

In Portugal in 2021, 85% of children placed in out-of-home care were in non-specialized residential care. Evidence on discipline strategies used in these childcare contexts is scarce. This study aims at analyzing the discipline strategies used by caregivers in residential care based on multiple informants’ reports - children/adolescents in care, ca...

Revitalizing Residential Care for Children and Youth: Cross-National Trends and Challenges addresses the question of how societies with developed welfare and social service systems assess current needs and future directions in their residential child and youth care sectors. This includes dealing with historical concerns raised about the placement o...

There are several motives underlying the process of deciding to become an adoptive family. However, research exploring this issue is scarce and essentially focused on infertility as the main motivation. The present mixed-method study aims to fill in this gap by exploring the motives to adopt of 126 Portuguese adoptive parents. The Parents’ Intervie...

Adoption provides a unique opportunity to study the simultaneous effect on adoptees’ development of environmental influences related to adoptive parenting, and children’s biology-based characteristics. In this paper, two Hybrid Dyadic Models were tested to study the mediational role of the adoptees’ negative reactivity on the relationship between m...

Parenting stress is related to the characteristics of both the child and the parents, as well as to parent–child interactions. In adoptive families, parenting stress has been identified as an indicator of the family's adjustment to adoption. The stress experienced by parents of adopted adolescents deserves special consideration, as adolescence is a...

Objective To explore potential postadoption moderators of the link between preadoption experiences and adoptees' social competence. Background In the context of the limited and inconsistent knowledge about adopted children's social competence, our hypotheses concern the interplay between preadoption parental neglect and adoptive parents' emotion s...

Adoption provides stability, loving care, security, and family interactions for children that have been separated from their birth parents. It also entails many challenges and difficulties, especially for adoptees in middle childhood, since feelings of loss can be particularly strong at this developmental stage. Aiming to use empirical evidence to...

In the decision making process for becoming an adoptive family, several underlying motivations can be found. Adoption literature has shown that parents’ adoption motivations can influence the adoption process itself and the parent-child relationship success. However, scarce research exploring the adoption-related motivations in depth has been devel...

The experience of being adopted and the development of an adoption related identity are unique and dependent on both individual and interpersonal variables. The way the adoption story is lived can have an impact on the adoptee's wellbeing and adaptation, both at home and in the school context. The goal of this study is to analyze, from the adoptee'...

Background: Acknowledgement/rejection of adoption related differences and communication about adoption are two of the most important features of adoptive family dynamics. The present study focuses on the role played by these two variables on the adoptees’ emotion regulation. Method: The adoptive parents of 70 school-aged children participated in th...

Communication about adoption is a family interaction process which is more than the simple exchange of information. Adoption communication can be characterized in terms of the level of openness of family conversations regarding the child's past and the degree of the family's adoption social disclosure. The objective of this study is to explore the...

Adoption communication is a key topic in adoption research. Still there are few studies which address adoption communication simultaneously in terms of quantity, quality and content of communication, taking into account specific age groups of adoptees. The main purpose of this study is to characterize family adoption communication according to pare...