I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Information Engineering (University of Pisa) with a hybrid profile bridging experimental Psychology with Biomedical Engineering.
My research focuses on the intersection of immersive technologies (VR/AR) and Psychophysiology. I specialize in designing virtual environments adapting in real-time based on the psychophysiological correlates recorded by integrated wearable biosensors (EEG, ECG, EDA) to assess and treat anxiety disorders.
The study of brain correlates of consciousness and of subliminal stimuli in psychopathologies (arachnophobia and PTSD, in particular) fostered my interest in the characterization of thresholds (both perceptual and emotional ones), which is central to the current scientific debate on the nature of emotions.
I’ve authored enough systematic reviews and meta-analyses to appreciate and fully embrace the principles of open science: all my research comes with data, codes, multimedia. All the tools developed are meant to be used by other clinician &/or scientists: all the data I collected are meant to be analyzed with new approaches by other researchers.
My main current interests concern the nature of emotions in their healthy and psychopathological examples. In particular, I’m contributing to develop:
While attending the University in Bologna I worked as a graphic designer (building website like the one you are looking at right now), and after graduating I accepted a life-long contract in a wonderful company. I gave up after three years to follow my research dream at the University of Pisa.
Here, I had the opportunity to conduct psychophysiological experiments about consciousness and emotions on sample of people with specific phobia, PTSD, and social anxiety disorder. Perceptually- and emotionally-subliminal stimuli dominated my focus during the PhD.
My main ambition is to develop tools, theories and paradigms that can have a real impact in the everyday-life of people: I hate the idea of spending years of work for something that is kept on some (virtual) shelf.
To reach this goal, I’m applying to the appropriate funding calls, and I’m open to national and international collaborations – which is one of the main reasons to show off what I can do on this website. Feel free to contact me in case my skills align with the project you are writing!
As you can see, I enjoy invited talks! Invite me through the Contacts section of this page
I’m not in this picture, as I’m taking it: it depicts Anil Seth humbly queueing to pose a question to Chalmers
I was lucky enough to meet many interesting researchers during my path. Here are some of them:
Every morning, an early-career researcher knows that (s)he will need to run faster than the other early-career researchers as desperate as him in pursuing a tenure position
That’s why I applied to many grants, mostly contributing to write those submitted by tutors and colleagues. I also wrote some personal ones, so far without success: the only award I could win was the University of Pisa grant for ERC (European Research Council) proposal preparation support, however my project was rejected despite this support (c’est la vie).
That’s why I’m more than open to collaborate on grant writing as PI or as a collaborator! That’s what I bring to the table:
Here is a non-exhaustive lists of what I learnt in my life, organized accordingly with the three missions of Universities – teaching, research, and dissemination/social impact. I should have call them “professional skills”, but this is not meant to be a boring CV
I was lucky enough to be bad in the only thing at which AI will soon substitute me: coding. On the other side, an ability I had to learn was the recruiting of relatively-rare samples (e.g., arachnophobic participants, ~4% of the general population): it is not just hard to find them, but also to involve them in an experiment aimed at terrifying them (for science!).
Now I have some dozens of participants for each anxiety disorder I’m studying (specific phobias, PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder…). Despite this ability, my papers were rejected from some impactful journals mainly for the sample size: I still have room for improvements, as in every facet of this job, and I want to keep improving more and more.
Beyond this, I consider myself scientifically honest and genuinely interested in finding robust answers to impactful questions, which translates in research integrity and the identification of timely scientific questions. I’m also a very efficient organizer of experiments, and I had to gain a higher-than-average experience in writing grants (“that’s the Italian academy, baby”).
I love to teach! It’s funny and I learn something new at every lesson I prepare. The first times I was very nervous, but after a while I started enjoying it so much that I’m doing it for free, though I would also enjoy being paid (once again: “that’s the Italian academy, baby”).
Anyway, I feel quite good at doing it: I do my best to give students something that they cannot find in text books or in LLMs, such as personal experiences in doing research and behind-the-scene hints to spot the dark side of the scientific literature.
At the end of each lesson I ask students for some anonymous feedbacks, which helped me to improve them over the years: now I’m able to carry on interactive debates supported by good-looking (but scientifically informative) slides. My favourite part is the reproduction of experiments during the lessons of General Psychology: my second-favourite part is the debunking of classical theories described in every book but disconfirmed by the newest replication studies.
I mean, doesn’t this webpage speak for itself? Not to mention the webpage I built for the BRAVE project, with an interview given to the national television!
I recently enjoyed scientific videomaking, and I’m a big fan of open science principles: all of my empirical studies come with an openly-accessible repository where everyone can find raw data and the codes I used to analyze them.
I’m more and more disgusted by the immoral amount of money that scientific journals make out of researchers’ unpaid peer-reviews, and I aim to free my papers from this vicious circle as soon as this choice will not undermine my metrics (did I already say “that’s the Italian academy, baby”?). My scientific spirit animal is Adam Mastroianni (sorry Adam for the “animal”, I know it does not sound as a compliment but it is).
Even if I hardly tolerate generalist social networks (Twitter X), I love using some of the most science-focused ones (e.g., BlueSky, ResearchGate, Mastodon’s FediScience) to disseminate my scientific data and to find interesting inspiration from other scientists.
Avoidance is a core psychopathological symptom, yet its elective assessment remains overly simplistic. Here, we introduce a standardized Virtual Reality Behavioral Avoidance Test (vr-BAT) for a multidimensional, dynamic characterization of avoidance behavior.
Interpersonal physiological synchrony is a coded language for emotional and psychological connection, capable of revealing the implicit mechanisms of social interactions. Herein we investigated the interpersonal shared dynamics of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) in the context of emotional contagion, focusing on the measurement of interpersonal physiological causal coupling (from now on, IPCC) through Electrodermal...
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a mental disorder characterized by excessive fear and avoidance of social situations. Traditional assessment methods rely on retrospective self-reports, which may not fully capture moment-to-moment variations in perceived anxiety. To address this, we designed a novel Virtual Reality (VR) scenario to simulate a real-life social situation, specifically a waiting room...
Volunteers were asked to participate in two experimental sessions separated by at least two weeks. In one session they were asked to undergo the vr-BAT, and in the other one the traditional version with a real spider (real-BAT): the order of the sessions was randomized.
Like many other journals, the Journal of Psychophysiology relies on the willingness of peers to contribute their time and energy to the reviewing process. We all know that reviewing manuscripts is time consuming, and that sometimes different journal editors request review of their incoming papers at the same time. The colleagues listed below have contributed...
Sergio Frumento
Ph.D., licensed clinical psychologist (membership card of the Order of Psychologists number 11118)
Mastodon profile (like Twitter, but not evil)
Twitter profile (hateful but useful)
BlueSky profile (anyone there?)
ResearchGate profile
LinkedIn profile
Scholar profile
Scopus profile
OrcID profile
Loop profile
Editor of this and co-editor of this Frontiers’ special issue
I will reply as soon as possible
Feel free to reach us for any need – whenever you want to (freely!) use the tools we developed, or you want me to share with you our data, or whatsoever
