Patrícia Arriaga holds a Ph.D. in Social and Organizational Psychology from ISCTE (Pre-Bologna, 2006), a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology from ISPA (Pre-Bolonha, 2 years, 2000), and is graduated in Psychology (5 years, 1996, Area of Clinical Psychology) by ISPA. She is certified by the Portuguese Professional Association of Psychologists (Ordem dos Psicólogos Portuguesa, OPP) in the areas of "Clinical and Health Psychology", "Work, Social and Organizational Psychology" and "Neuropsychology".

Arriaga began teaching in higher education in 1996. She was a Fellow of the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT) for Post-Doctoral Studies (2008-2009), conducting her project at both ISCTE and Granada University. Subsequently, she worked as a Researcher (2009-2012) at CIS under the Science 2008 Program, funded by the FCT. 

Currently, she holds the position of an Associate Professor with Habilitation at ISCTE, in addition to her role as a Senior Researcher at CIS. 

Research Main interests: 

Her research focuses on exploring socio-affective processes through a multi-method approach, analyzing subjective, behavioral, and physiological responses in human social interactions. She investigates the impact of various social interventions and the use of tools (e.g., multimedia applications, board games, videos, media campaigns, social robots) designed to enhance well-being and prosocial behaviors in social, health, and educational contexts.  Her projects typically involve multidisciplinary teams, predominantly from computer science. More recently, she has contributed to meta-science, aiming to enhance scientific practices, by collaborating with international research teams to ensure more robust, transparent, and reproducible research.

Arriaga has earned several competitive research projects funded externally (e.g. FCT, Bial Foundation, Erasmus+, Compete 2020) and has published in book chapters, conference proceedings, and refereed scientific journals. These range from specialized and thematic (e.g., Emotion, Psychology of Violence, Aggressive Behavior, Psychology of Music, Mindfulness, Journal of Creative Behavior, Cortex, Psychophysiology, Biological Psychology) to general (e.g., Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Health Psychology) and multidisciplinary journals (e.g. Health Communication; Health Education Research, Computers in Human Behavior; SoftwareX, HardwareX, Nature Human Behaviour).

She has been invited to evaluate scientific articles and research project applications at both national and international levels, including for governmental agencies such as the US National Science Foundation, the Dutch Research Council (Netherlands), the Shota Rustaveli Georgian National Science Foundation (Georgia), and the Swiss National Science Foundation.