Dr Rita Lopes

Senior Lecturer

Module Leader, Positive Psychology at Work & Final Project - Capstone

Department of Professional Psychology , School Of Psychology

Dr Rita Lopes’s background includes a number of industry and academic settings over the past seventeen years, across multiple countries. Her research and academic focus relate to positive occupational psychology and workplace dynamics, with a particular interest in workplace well-being and innovative research methods and methodologies. She is especially interested in contributing to a better match between academic and professional settings, boosting real-world change.

Qualifications

PhD Occupational Psychology – University College London (UCL), UK
MSc Social and Organisational Psychology – ISPA, Portugal
BSc Applied Psychology: Social and Organisational Psychology – ISPA, Portugal

Areas Of Interest

Positive Occupational Psychology
Subjective well-being and the workplace
Affective experiences and the workplace
Experience sampling methodology
The psychology of entrepreneurship

OVERVIEW

Rita’s research focus has been on extending the knowledge and information available on how happiness at work fluctuates, what produces affective changes in how people feel, and how it impacts the work produced. This research stream stems from the desire to ensure that the knowledge produced by research is useful in real-world settings, and it is an interest developed over many years of working with organisations across industries and geographical locations.

A central aspect of the ongoing research has been the development of an experience-sampling mobile app to capture how several everyday aspects affect happiness. As a result, it generates a novel type of in-the-moment happiness data that reflects how each person feels at various moments, and how the situation they were in at that time might have contributed to it. This is distinct from other studies regarding happiness at work which historically relied on recollection and memory integration to report on feelings and situations from the past (e.g. “How happy have you felt throughout last week?”).

RESEARCH

Rita’s research stream aims to promote and develop:

Methodologies and tools that bypass the need for recollection, interpretation, or memory barriers in reporting one’s affective changes, by using an experience sampling method.
The understanding of how everyday aspects (e.g. activities, interaction with others, etc.) affect our happiness.
The identification of what and how individual factors (e.g. personality, entrepreneurial tendencies and abilities) and socio-demographic aspects (e.g. education, income, age, gender) impact how people perceive their affective experiences in their daily lives.
A scalable methodology to contribute to a better understanding of workplace dynamics, by identifying key areas of improvement towards employee subjective well-being (SWB).
A new approach to team management and leadership geared towards understanding SWB with data-driven policies and change management.

Recent research

Lopes, R.C. (in preparation). An Experience Sampling perspective on the impact of Affect Experience at work.
De Silva, S. & Lopes, R.C. (in preparation). Psychometric Properties of the Satisfaction with Life Scale in Sri Lanka. Psychological Assessment.

RESEARCH CENTRES AND GROUPS

UEL Mental Health and Social Change Research Group
Founding member of UCL’s PERL – Psychology of Entrepreneurship Research Lab

TEACHING

Module leader: Positive Psychology at Work (MSc Applied Positive Psychology)
Module leader: Final Project – Capstone (MSc Applied Positive Psychology)

Publications

The last four years of publications can be viewed below.

Full publications list

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Research repository

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