Valentina Petrolini

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Verified

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• PhD
• Associate Professor at University of Bologna

In this paper, we discuss some insights from Basaglia’s psychiatric research that help us identify and support the most promising aspects of Marx’s ethics and his critique of capitalist labor and society. We aim to show that the experiences and values promoted by the Basaglian movement allow us to draw some essential lessons about contemporary soci...

In addition to its descriptive uses, 'autistic'-originally a medical label-is also used pejoratively (against ingroups and outgroups), and has recently been proudly reclaimed, especially in connection with neurodiversity movements. This phenomenon poses interesting questions for the philosophical debate on pejoratives. In this paper, we focus on tw...

In this paper we tackle the issue of overlapping clinical presentation of autism and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Recently, the phenomenon of camouflaging has been extensively discussed in the context of autism research, whereas it has not been similarly explored in the context of BPD. We aim to show that camouflaging strategies are relev...

Background Individuals exhibit varying degrees of flexibility depending on different characteristics, conditions, and diagnoses. The Flexibility Scale is a comprehensive informant-report measure used to assess multiple aspects of flexibility in autistic and non-autistic children and youth, with an emphasis on cognitive aspects. This tool has not be...

One prominent intellectualist position in the debate on the nature of skill, famously defended by Stanley and Williamson (2001; 2017), claims that skill and knowing-how are reducible to knowledgethat. To defend this claim, Stanley and Williamson argue that skill and knowledge-that develop in a sufficiently similar way through different learning sta...

Over the past few years, there has been much debate about how autistic people should be described and labeled. Two main tendencies have emerged in this discussion, usually known as the person-first approach and the identity-first approach. While the former proposes to talk about ‘person(s) with autism’, the latter claims that ‘autistic person’ is m...

BJPS: Short Reads https://www.thebsps.org/short-reads/drawing-the-line-serpico-petrolini/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3lD6qPKBLghpjRWGXYnjhAK0gVzO5wnkZahG3XZoup3eK7yP01vyQhHzg_aem_AekpsFWMqVi6S_oc4H5hzxUV05NoYK4BHh256JJGZ-yrxvWed_cfyFeKGgjdY_xXy85T0XWuC8anbp9YLDOzeEPH

Human beings display the extraordinary ability of grasping and communicating abstract concepts. Yet, no standardized instruments exist to assess this ability. Developing these tools is paramount for understanding abstract representations such as social concepts, with ramifications in educational and clinical settings. Here, we developed an image da...

Autistic individuals are commonly said – and also consider themselves – to be excessively literalist, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances. This literalist bias seems to be fairly specific to autism and still lacks a convincing explanation. In this paper we explore a novel hypothesis that has the pot...

Recent trends in psychiatry involve a transition from categorical to dimensional frameworks, in which the boundary between health and pathology is understood as a difference in degree rather than as a difference in kind. A major tenet of dimensional approaches is that no qualitative distinction can be made between health and pathology. As a consequ...

Characterizations of autism include multiple references to rigid or inflexible features, but the notion of rigidity itself has received little systematic discussion. In this paper we shed some light on the notion of rigidity in autism by identifying different facets of this phenomenon as discussed in the literature, such as fixed interests, insiste...

Camouflaging may be characterized as a set of actions and strategies more or less consciously adopted by some autistic people to navigate the neurotypical social world. Despite the increased interest that this phenomenon has garnered, its nature remains elusive and in need of conceptual clarification. In this paper, we aim to put forward an inclusi...

The current debate on literary cognitivism in the philosophy of fiction typically assumes that we can rigorously distinguish between fictional and factual, and focuses on the question of whether and how works of fiction can impart propositional knowledge to the reader. In this paper we suggest that this way of framing the debate may be problematic....

The current debate on literary cognitivism in the philosophy of fiction typically assumes that we can rigorously distinguish between fictional and factual, and focuses on the question of whether and how works of fiction can impart propositional knowledge to the reader. In this paper we suggest that this way of framing the debate may be problematic....

Human beings display the extraordinary ability of grasping and communicating abstract concepts. Yet, no standardised instruments exist to assess this ability. Developing these tools is paramount for understanding abstract representations such as social concepts, with ramifications in educational and clinical settings. Here, we developed an image da...

Vocal bursts are non-linguistic affectively-laden sounds with a crucial function in human communication, yet their affective structure is still debated. Studies showed that ratings of valence and arousal follow a V-shaped relationship in several kinds of stimuli: high arousal ratings are more likely to go on a par with very negative or very positiv...

Despite several criticisms surrounding the DSM classification in psychiatry, a significant bulk of research on mental conditions still operates according to two core assumptions: a) homogeneity, that is the idea that mental conditions are sufficiently homogeneous to justify generalization; b) additive comorbidity, that is the idea that the coexiste...

The notions of at-risk and subthreshold conditions are increasingly discussed in psychiatry to describe mild, brief, or otherwise atypical syndromes that fail to meet the criteria for clinical relevance. However, the concept of vulnerability is still underexplored in philosophy of psychiatry. This article discusses psychiatric vulnerability to clar...

The notions of at-risk and subthreshold conditions are increasingly discussed in psychiatry to describe mild, brief, or otherwise atypical syndromes that fail to meet the criteria for clinical relevance. However, the concept of vulnerability is still underexplored in philosophy of psychiatry. This article discusses psychiatric vulnerability to clar...

According to several researchers, core affect lies at the foundation of our affective lives and may be characterized as a consciously accessible state combining arousal (activated-deactivated) and valence (pleasure-displeasure). The interaction between these two dimensions is still a matter of debate. In this paper we provide a novel hypothesis con...

The initial online publication contained several typesetting errors.

Disorders of agency could be described as cases where people encounter difficulties in assessing their own degree of responsibility or involvement with respect to a relevant action or event. These disturbances in one's sense of agency appear to be meaningfully connected with some mental disorders and with some symptoms in particular-i.e. auditory v...

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophreni...

The relation between normality and pathology has intrigued philosophers for centuries, but it has been recently revived by a number of researchers who have articulated and defended various versions of the continuity thesis (or CT, namely the idea that normal and pathological states are not categorically different). Despite a growing interest in the...

Phenomena of reality distortion such as delusions or hallucinations are indubitably among the most puzzling features of mental disorders. These are instances in which patients perceive the world in a different way with respect to healthy subjects and believe things that run counter common sense or are utterly unsupported by evidence. In this paper...

Bortolotti argues that we cannot distinguish delusions from other irrational beliefs in virtue of their epistemic features alone. Although her arguments are convincing, her analysis leaves an important question unanswered: What makes delusions pathological? In this paper I set out to answer this question by arguing that the pathological character o...

In this commentary, I argue that the cognitive-emotional framework put forward by Pessoa (2013) can be successfully applied to psychopathology and, in particular, to the reasoning of delusional subjects. More specifically, I show that the notion of executive competition (Ch. 7) offers a significant contribution to the idea that delusions may involv...

Are mental and physical disorders meaningfully comparable? Are we are entitled to characterize psychiatric disorders in terms of illnesses? Traditionally, most attempts to define what counts as an illness rely on some notion of normal functioning that has been altered or disturbed, where the "norm" is established from an evolutionary (Wakefield 199...