Alessandro Grecucci

Overview

“Hardwired to connect with each other, we do so through emotions. Our brains, bodies and minds are inseparable from the emotions that animate them"  (pg. vii)  Fosha, Siegel, & Solomon (2009)

The study of the emotional life of our brains attempts to understand and explain our ability to process emotions and channel them into healthy actions, with the goal of building accurate theoretical models and tools of intervention.
This goal has occupied philosophers, psychologists and writers for many centuries.However, only recently the emergence of the field known as Affective Neuroscience has offered a valuable avenue to understand our emotions.

We seek to investigate how we perceive, modulate and express our emotions in normal and abnormal conditions by using s/fMRI, EEG, MEG and neuropsychology. Failures in correctly perceiving, modulating, and even expressing our emotions lie at the core of many psychopathological conditions.

Building on findings and tools derived from Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology, our mission is to develop new methods and procedures to ameliorate such problems.

Research directions

  • Neural bases of emotion perception and regulation (fMRI, EEG, MEG)
  • Brain morphometric analyses of autism, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder (sMRI)
  • Experiental psychopathology and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation
  • Abnormal emotional processing in neurological patients (brain tumors and ischemic patients)
  • Neural bases of psychotherapy techniques and psychotherapy process
  • Development of treatment protocols to ameliorate emotional deficits

Methodologies

  • Behavioral experiments and clinical testing (neurological and psychiatric patients)
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): functional MRI, structural analyses (VBM, SBM), Dynamic causal modelling (DCM), Psychophysiological interactions (PPI)
  • Electroencephalography (EEG): Event related potentials, spectral perturbations, source localization
  • Computational simulations: artificial neural networks models of cognitive and emotional functional and their pathology (simulative neuropsychology)

Internal collaborations

Remo Job, Full Professor
Luca Piretti, post-doc
Roma Siugzdaite, post-doc
Edoardo Pappainanni, PhD student

External collaborations

Jon Frederickson, Washington School of Psychiatry, Washington (USA)
Raffaella Rumiati, SISSA, Trieste (Italy).
Harold Dadomo, Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma (Italy) and Istituto Scienze Cognitive (Italy) 
Chiara De Panfilis, Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma (Italy).
Antonio Prunas, Department of Psychology, University of Milano Bicocca (Italy)
Cristiano Crescentini, Department of Human Sciences, University of Udine (Italy)
Daniele Chiffi, Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia)
Dante Amelio, Protonterapia, APSS of Trento (Italy)
Maurizio Amichetti, Protonterapia, APSS of Trento (Italy)
Marta Panzeri, Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation, University of Padova (Italy)
Fabrizio Didonna, Department of Psychiatry, Villa Margherita Private Hospital, Vicenza (Italy)
Alan Sanfey, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands)

Selected publications

Scientific articles:

  • Grecucci, A., Rubicondo D., Siugzdaite, R., Surian, L., Job, R. (2016). Uncovering social deficits in autistic individuals: A source based morphometry study. Frontiers in Neuroscience, Vol. 10
  • Grecucci, A., De Pisapia, N., Venuti, P., Palladino, M.P. Job, R. (2015). Baseline and strategic mindful regulation: behavioral and physiological investigation. Plos One, 10(1): e0116541.
  • Grecucci, A., Giorgetta, C., Rattin, A., Guerreschi, C., Sanfey, A. Bonini, N. (2014). Time devours things: how time and impulsivity affect temporal decisions in pathological gambling. Plos One, 9(10), e109197.
  • Giorgetta, C., Grecucci, A., Rattin, A. Guerreschi, C., Sanfey, A., Bonini, N. (2014). To play or not to play: A personal dilemma in pathological gambling. Psychiatry Research, 219(3), 562-9
  • Grecucci, A., Giorgetta, C., van Wout, M., Bonini, N., Sanfey, A. (2013). Reappraising the Ultimatum: an fMRI study of emotion regulation and decision-making. Cerebral Cortex, 23(2), 399-410
  • Grecucci, A., Rumiati, R., R. Siugzdaite, Londero, D., Fabbro, F., Brabilla, P. (2013). Emotional resonance deficits in autistic children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 43(3),616-28.
  • Giorgetta, C., Grecucci, A., Bonini, N., Coricelli, G., Sanfey, A. (2012). Waves of regret: a MEG study of emotion and decision making. Neuropsychologia, 51(1), 38-51.
  • Giorgetta, C., Grecucci, A., Zanon, S., Perini, L. Balestrieri, M. Bonini, N., Sanfey, A., Brambilla, P. (2012). Reduced risk-taking behaviour as a trait feature of anxiety. Emotion, 12(6), 1373-83.
  • Roshtstein, P. Soto, D., Grecucci, A., Geng, J.J., Humphreys, G.W. (2011). The role of the pulvinar in resolving competition between memory and visual selection: A functional connectivity study. Neuropsychologia, 49(6):1544-52.
  • Grecucci, A., Soto, D., Rumiati, R., Humphreys, G.W., Roshtstein, P. (2010). The Interrelations between Verbal Working Memory and Visual Selection of Emotional Faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(6), 1189-1200.

Books and Special Issues:

  • Grecucci, A., Frederickson, J., Job, R. (Editors) (2017). Advances in Emotion Regulation: from neuroscience to psychotherapy. Frontiers in Psychology, Special issue.
  • Grecucci, A., Siugzdaite, R., Job, R. (Editors) (2017). Advanced neuroimaging methods for studying autism disorder. Frontiers in Neuroscience, Special issue, Vol. 10.

Website

Further information can be found at the following webpage: CLI.A.N. - Clinical and Affective Neuroscience lab