Serena Petrocchi

Dr Serena Petrocchi is a Lecturer and Researcher (Maître d’Enseignement et de Recherche) at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences of the Università della Svizzera italiana.
 
Dr Petrocchi is the Coordinator of the Master in Cognitive Psychology in Health Communication jointly offered byUniversità Vita-Salute San Raffaele. She teaches Practical Application in Psychology and Health Communication: Advanced Research Methods at the Master in Cognitive Psychology in Health Communication and Advanced Research Methods in Health Communication at the Master in Communication, Management, and Health. Previously, she supervised the Field Projects for the Master in Cognitive Psychology in Health Communication.
 
She was previously appointed as a postdoc researcher at the Faculty of Psychology at Keele University (UK) under a Marie Curie fellowship and at the Department of History, Society, and Human Studies at Università del Salento under a “5x1000” fellowship. She was a senior researcher at the European Institute of Oncology (Milan), working on an H2020 project on patients' preferences for cancer treatments. She collaborated with the European Alliance for Personalized Medicine (Brussels).
 
In 2020, she received the Italian National Qualification as an Associate Professor. Dr Petrocchi has a Master's degree and a PhD in Psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan.
 
Her research interests include the psychosocial determinants of mental and physical health and decision-making processes in healthcare contexts. She has researched doctor-patient relationships and interpersonal trust in predicting patient satisfaction and adherence to medical regimes in adults and children/adolescents. Within the context of pediatric family medicine, she worked on the early evaluation of signs and symptoms of Autism by paediatricians in children under one year of age.  She has researched decision fatigue in physicians, its determinants, consequences, and physiological correlates. She is also interested in the relationships between trust and forgiveness in case of medical error.
 
She is affiliated with the Laboratory of Applied Psychology and Intervention (Università del Salento), and she has taught several courses at the Faculty of Psychology of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and at the Faculty of Medicine of the Università degli Studi, Milan.