Researcher
University of Trento
Network Member

Simona de Falco is a Research Fellow at the University of Trento. She is a developmental psychologist with clinical experience in diagnostic assessment of parent-child relationship and of autism spectrum disorders. Her main research interests focus on parent-child interaction and its relation with child psychological abilities (language, play skills, joint attention, emotional availability) in typical and atypical development. de Falco taught Developmental Psychology at the University of Trento from 2006 to 2010, and taught Disability Psychology at the University of Valle D'Aosta in 2005. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Child and Family Research, National Institute of Child and Human Development (USA), at the Center for Autism Research and Treatment of the University of California Los Angeles, at the Institute of Psychological Medicine of the University of Tuebingen. She is involved in a research project on the neurobiological bases of parenting. She has also been involved in several other research projects on typical and atypical development including a cross-cultural longitudinal study of child typical development, the study of the neural correlates of emotional processing in autism spectrum disorders, and school inclusion of children with intellectual disability. de Falco has an expertise in developing observational tools for the assessment of semi-structured adult-child interaction in both diagnostic and therapeutic context. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Italian Association of Psychology and a member of the Professional Association of Psychologists in Italy since 2006.

De Falco holds an M.A. in Psychology from the Second University of Naples and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Education from the University of Trento.

Discipline