Gabriela Almeida

Gabriela Almeida (PhD) is Psychomotor Therapist and Assistant Professor of the Sports and Health Department, School of Health and Human Development, at the University of Évora. She is dedicated to the bachelor and master courses on Psychomotor Rehabilitation and Psychomotricity. She is Director of the Master in Psychomotricity. She has a significant theoretical and clinical background in terms of children’s development (assessment and intervention). Her research interests include (1) motor development across the lifespan, (2) assessment of motor and emotional competencies in children, with typically developing and with neurodevelopmental disabilities or psychological/emotional problems, (3) affordances, and the perceptions of affordances in different stages of life, (4) outdoor play and physical activity and risky play. Almeida’s research focuses on the assessment and intervention of motor, cognitive, social, and emotional development, particularly the development of fundamental movement skills and the association with perceived competence. In Master course on Psychomotricity she is dedicated to supervision of mental health (children and adolescents) interships. Her major research interest is the study of the perception of affordances for different motor skills in childhood: that is, what children think they can do and what they real performed. She, as co-author, developed, and validated a protocol to assess motor competence in children and adolescents, to be applicable in research, education, and clinical settings. More recently, she began to investigate the perception of affordances in older people, developing a new test/task for fall risk assessment in community-dwelling older adults, The Stepping–forward affordance perception test (SF-APT).