SPINELLI MARIA

Maria Spinelli is Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology (PSIC-02/A) at the Department of Psychology, University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti–Pescara, where she coordinates the second-level Master’s program in Parenting Psychology: Assessment, Prevention, and Intervention and is a member of the PhD Board in Psychology. Previously, she was a fixed-term researcher at the same university and a research fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She has held international research appointments as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (USA) and at Leiden University (The Netherlands).
Her research activity lies within the field of developmental psychology and focuses on socio-emotional development in early childhood, with particular attention to the parent–child relationship, emotion regulation, bio-behavioural dyadic synchrony, outcomes of preterm birth, and parenting processes in typical and atypical contexts, also from a cross-cultural perspective. She coordinates and participates in nationally and internationally funded research projects, including studies supported by the BIAL Foundation, the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), and university research funds, collaborating with research groups in Europe, the United States, and several countries across the African continent.
She is the author of more than 60 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and contributions to national and international volumes. In 2018 she received the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP) award for best scientific article. Her H-index is 16.
She teaches in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs and supervises research fellows, scholarship holders, PhD candidates, and graduate theses. She is Associate Editor of international scientific journals and serves as reviewer for several journals in the fields of developmental and family psychology.