I am a licensed clinical Psychologist and 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!
Interview on TG2, a national television
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 in pursuing a tenure position
That’s why between 2024 and 2025 I co-wrote 11 research proposals for national and international schemes, 4 of them as PI. My ERC Starting Grant project was one of 10 proposals (out of 52) selected by external evaluators for the University of Pisa’s ERC support programme; the Horizon Europe proposal QL-AIM, which I helped write, passed all evaluation thresholds (13/15) in the second stage, although it was not funded; and two competitive Circle U. calls funded my research stay in Vienna and the “Venture Creation” summer school (2026). My own project, FEARLESS, is now under evaluation at the FWF ESPRIT programme and the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships.
I’m always open to joining new proposals, as PI or as a collaborator! 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.
scientific publications
(mostly as first or co-first author)
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) represents an increasingly prevalent challenge for healthcare. Exposure therapy is the elective treatment that has undergone significant development over last decades thanks to Virtual Reality (VR): its last frontier is represented by adaptive scenarios changing in real time to maximize efficacy and tolerability of the exposure. In the present study, 15...
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. In 75 participants with varying arachnophobia levels, we validated the vr-BAT by demonstrating that key avoidance metrics (Distance, Time, and Velocity) correlated robustly...
Interpersonal physiological synchrony is often treated as an embodied marker of social connection, but it remains unclear when physiological alignment reflects interpersonal transmission rather than common input. Here, using a preregistered design, previously unacquainted dyads (N= 48, 24 dyads) completed a social Leader-Follower condition and a matched non-social co-exposure condition in which both participants viewed...
explicit prejudice. Kapah and Freedman focus on adolescents, emphasizing the psychological 35 relevance of immersive self-representation during stages. Their findings 36 emphasize the important role of virtual mirrors and embodiment in enhancing users' sense of 37 presence and suggest these mechanisms may contribute to improvements in self-38 esteem changes. 39These studies suggest that the psychological...
Assessment of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is limited by paradigms that often target performance-related fears and its reliance on static self-reports that fail to capture the dynamic, in-the-moment nature of anxiety. This study introduces a novel Virtual Reality (VR) framework to assess SAD that integrates continuous self-ratings of anxiety with objective physiological data. Sixty-three participants...
because open science is the best thing ever
Every empirical study I run comes with its materials: raw and pre-processed data, analysis scripts, stimuli and software. They are meant to be reused – by clinicians who want to run the same tests and by researchers who want to analyse the data in new ways. If you use them, please cite the related paper; if you need a hand, just contact me.
vr-BAT – Behavioral Avoidance Test in virtual reality
Data from 75 people with varying fear of spiders who took both a virtual and a real-life avoidance test: raw and pre-processed data, a reproducible R analysis, the Unity project and video demonstrations of both tests.
Data & software (OSF) · Step-by-step protocol (protocols.io) · Paper (Communications Psychology, 2026)
BRAVE – adaptive virtual reality for social anxiety
The VR scenario we built to assess and treat social anxiety disorder, with the project’s raw data and the formal specification of the state machine that drives the real-time adaptation.
Code (GitHub) · Data (OSF) · Main results (IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2026)
Spider-builder – realistic 3D spiders in augmented reality
RitualOfChud, a Unity tool to change the hairiness, locomotion and body/leg size of realistic 3D spiders in real time, plus data and R analysis from the study in which volunteers made holographic spiders look as dangerous – or as harmless – as possible.
Software (GitHub) · Data & analysis (OSF) · Paper (Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2024)
Subliminal multisensory integration
Materials from the behavioural (just-noticeable difference) and EEG/ERP sessions of our study on the unconscious integration of stimuli from different senses, with slides and paper.
Materials (OSF) · Paper (Frontiers in Psychology, 2024)
War-related distress in Ukrainian civilians
Everything needed to rerun our online PsyToolkit study on the psychosocial effects of the Russian invasion, plus the statistical dataset and analysis.
Materials & data (OSF) · Paper: Conflict and Health (2026, in press)
Preregistration – autonomic coupling in emotional contagion
Our preregistered study on how physiological arousal spreads between people, analysed with directed coherence.
Preregistration (OSF) · Conference paper (IEEE MeMeA 2025) · Preprint
All my projects: osf.io/unpqz
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
GitHub profile
OSF profile
UniPi 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
