The ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) is a high-quality public university institute and one of the most dynamic and innovative in Portugal, mainly in the areas of Management and Economics, Sociology and Public Policy, Social Sciences and Humanities, Information and Communication Technologies and Architecture. ISCTE-IUL articulates education and research, mainly at the doctoral level, but also in the masters and undergraduate programmes, being a research oriented university with a multi and inter-disciplinary approach, that includes nine research units, six laboratories, as well as 16 Departments and four Schools, which are the main organizational structures of the Institute (see www.iscte.pt). Research activities and results are also important at ISCTE-IUL for designing teaching programmes and keeping them up to date, and for the students training in research.

Currently ISCTE-IUL has about 9000 students, a half of them in doctoral and master programs, and 400 professors. ISCTE-IUL runs, each year, more than 200 scientific projects. The research team for this project is Cis-IUL, Centre for Psychological Research and Social Intervention at ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon that develops research, research-based intervention and scientific training in psychology, focusing on developmental psychology and social and organizational psychology within the framework of the social sciences. It is recognized by the Portuguese national science foundation (FCT) as an Excellence R&D centre. Cis-IUL has over 60 researchers, and is still growing. This gives it a critical mass to make it, a centre of reference in several areas at the national (e.g., gender relations, organizational psychology, community psychology) and international level (e.g., risk perception, emotions, intergroup relations, social cognition, social justice). Cis-IUL research engages in (a) the empirically-based development of theories and models and (b) the application of such theories to the analysis and solution of social, political and economic problems of Portuguese and European societies. Cis-IUL reaches out to society at three main levels: policymakers, community, and the entrepreneurial world. The topics researched by the research group members "Community, Education and Development” (CED) in this proposal include:

• children and adolescent development
• family context, attachment, parenting styles
• school context, peer interaction, bullying
• community development, empowerment, psychological sense of community