Nicola Petrocchi
Nicola Petrocchi is an Italian psychologist at John Cabot University in Rome, and the founder of Compassionate Mind Italia. He works on the physiology of compassion and on compassion-focused therapy. He is the second author of the 2017 meta-analysis, with Peter Muris, that separated the positive and the negative halves of the Self-Compassion Scale and asked which half was doing the work.
Who they are
His post was confirmed on 11 September 2026.
He is worth introducing carefully, because the paper he is best known for here is a critical one. He is not an opponent of compassion research. He practises inside it and trains therapists in it. The objection he co-authored is an internal criticism, made by people who want the construct measured properly, which is the strongest kind of criticism there is.
Key papers
Muris, P., & Petrocchi, N. (2017). "Protection or vulnerability? A meta-analysis of the relations between the positive and negative components of self-compassion and psychopathology", Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 24(2), 373 to 383. First published online in 2016. Second author. Splitting the questionnaire into its kind items and its harsh items, the harsh ones were tied considerably more strongly to mental health problems than the kind ones were.
Key ideas
The questionnaire at issue asks three sorts of kind question and three sorts of harsh one, and then flips the harsh answers round so that not being harsh counts as being kind. The 2017 paper is the first systematic attempt to see what happens if you stop flipping them.
Being a practitioner inside the field is the point of this page. Criticism of a measure from someone with no stake in the idea is easy to discount. Criticism from someone who runs compassion training is not.
The dispute is set out on this site from both sides, with the reply from Kristin Neff and where we land, on the page for the two halves of the scale.
Concepts on this site
Compassionate and Uncompassionate Self-Responding
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Muris, P., & Petrocchi, N. (2017). Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 24(2), 373 to 383.
- Vault verification record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed.