Dr Francesca Serra

dr-francesca-serra

Honorary Research Fellow in Psychological Medicine

Mood Disorders Research Group

Contact Details

Francesca Serra is a Honorary Research Fellow in Psychological Medicine and a member of the Mood Disorders Research Group.

Francesca qualified with a BSc (Hons) in Psychological Science from Cagliari University, Italy in 2010 and an MSc (Hons) in Clinical Psychology at the University of Padua, Italy in 2013. After graduating, she became a member of the Quantitative Psychology laboratory (QP Lab) at the University of Padua where she contributed to the development and improvement of a new assessment methodology for clinical disorders called Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA). She commenced her PhD in October 2014, after being awarded a University of Padua studentship. Her research focused on the assessment of mood disorders and the development of a new tool for distinguishing between a range of depressive conditions in bipolar disorder, such as mixed or agitated states.

In 2016, while continuing to study for her PhD, Francesca spent six-months working with the Mood Disorders Research Group at the University of Worcester as a visiting academic. During this time, she conducted research investigating agitated depression in bipolar disorder. Francesca completed her PhD in Padua in March 2018. In May 2018, Francesca joined the University of Worcester working with the Mood Disorders Research Group as a postdoctoral researcher in Psychological Medicine. There she continued her research into agitated features in bipolar disorder and also investigated the relationship between menstrual cycle, menopause and mood episodes within bipolar disorder.

Qualifications

March 2018 PhD Psychological Sciences – University of Padua (Italy)

December 2013 MSc (Hons) Clinical Psychology - University of Padua (Italy)

December 2010 BSc (Hons) Psychological Science - Cagliari University (Italy)

Publications

Francesca Serra, Katherine Gordon-Smith, Amy Perry, Christine Fraser, Arianna Di Florio, Nick Craddock, Ian Jones, Lisa Jones (2019) Agitated depression in bipolar disorder. Bipolar Disorders 21:547-555.

Spoto, A., Serra, F., Donadello, I., Granziol, U., & Vidotto, G. (2018). New Perspectives in the Adaptive Assessment of Depression: the ATS-PD version of the QuEDS. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1101.

Demontis, F., Serra, F., & Serra, G. (2017). Antidepressant-induced Dopamine Receptor Dysregulation: A Valid Animal Model of Manic-Depressive Illness. Current neuropharmacology, 15(3), 417-423.

Serra, F., Spoto, A., Ghisi, M., & Vidotto, G. (2017). Improving major depressive episode assessment: A new tool developed by Formal Psychological Assessment. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 214.

Granziol, U., Bottesi, G., Serra, F., Spoto, A., & Vidotto, G. (2017). New perspectives on the assessment of the Social Anxiety Disorder: the Formal Psychological Assessment. Journal of Evidence-Based Psychotherapies, 17(2).

Serra, F., Spoto, A., Ghisi, M., & Vidotto, G. (2015). Formal psychological assessment in evaluating depression: a new methodology to build exhaustive and irredundant adaptive questionnaires. PloS one, 10(4), e0122131.

Serra, G., Demontis, F., Serra, F., De Chiara, L., Spoto, A., Girardi, P., Vidotto, G., & Serra, G. (2014). Memantine: New prospective in bipolar disorder treatment. World journal of psychiatry, 4(4), 80.