Scientific activities have been developed on the domain of Work Psychology, and in particularly the Human Factors approach, that aims to achieve increased levels of human reliability through a variety of interventions. Such conceptually rich area of expertise involves different areas of Psychology namely Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology and Work Psychology.

Current research interests consider two main areas of work: 1. To understand human behaviour at the workplace and its relations with a variety of organizational characteristics. Most recent approaches sustain that human behaviour is decurrent and is constrained by a multiplicity of latent organizational factors. 2. To develop interventions that may help organizations to better manage the latent factors as is the case of selection procedures, training activities, work organization and design and to better understand their contributions to individual, group and organizational performance.

Teresa D’Oliveira is the responsible researcher of four research projects. A first project considers how workers describe their organizations in terms of safety namely their perceptions in what concerns goals and specific activities on safety issues, initiatives that promote safety and information of safety problems, supervisors and colleagues’ behaviours regarding safety topics, risk perceptions and self-reported safety behaviours. This projects aims to introduce greater clarity in this domain and to consider how a variety of settings and domains of activity stimulate different safety expectancies and behaviours. A second project considers the concept of risk perceptions and proposes to illustrate how risk perceptions are not necessarily linked with physical consequences to the worker and its legal conception implies. In several occupations, when asked to describe the risks in their workplaces, workers identify mainly dangers with psychological consequences therefore sustaining the psychological nature of work risks. A third project considers fatigue at the workplace and how work activities and their organization may contribute to its levels. Finally, a fourth project contemplates how the development of shared mental models may contribute to higher safety levels namely through better human error prevention.