Valentina Petrolini

I work mainly in philosophy of psychiatry and psychology.

My research focuses on the boundary between mental health and pathology and on the notion of vulnerability to mental disorders - i.e., what it means to be at-risk of developing a mental disorder, or to transition from a healthy state to a pathological one.

I am also interested in affect, emotions, and moods in connection with psychopathology. I recently started working on ambivalent emotions and I am getting particularly interested in the adaptive and disruptive nature of anger.

I work as Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), where I am a member of the Lindy Lab.

I am also adjunct professor at the University of Parma, where I teach a yearly graduate seminar in philosophy of psychiatry.

I obtained my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cincinnati.

"I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree' pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.'"
(Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 467)