Carlo Bellieni


Carlo V. Bellieni is an Italian neonatologist and a bioethicist. He served as Secretary of the Bioethics Committee of the Italian Pediatrics Society. He is also a member of the ethical board of the Siena Biotech research facility, and of the Ethical Board of the Siena University Hospital, where he directs the neonatal intensive therapy unit.
He follows the empirical approach in bioethics. According to his studies, an ethical approach includes three main points: realism, reason and empathy.
Bellieni is the author of many clinical research papers in international scientific journals, including studies on electromagnetic emission from neonatal incubators and on pain in children, and has written several books in Italian, Spanish, French, and English on neonatal pain and bioethics.

Studies on infants' pain

He created and developed a new method of nonpharmacological analgesia called "sensorial saturation", based on the simultaneous administration of gentle stimuli to the baby during a painful procedure, reported among the most effective for pain in babies. Bellieni also performed studies on babies' crying, developing a pain scale based on the acoustical analysis of crying.

Studies on human crying and weeping

Neonatal crying analysis: Bellieni performed several analyses on babies' crying and showed that it is not useful to detect the cause that provoked it; nonetheless, it contain a sort of protolanguage, namely the patterns of crying change dramatically when it exceeds a certain pain threshold.
Meaning of weeping: Bellieni , and concluded that most animals can cry but only humans have psychoemotional shedding of tears, also known as “weeping”. Weeping is a behavior that induces empathy perhaps with the mediation of the mirror neurons network, and influences the mood through the release of hormones elicited by the massage effect made by the tears on the cheeks, or through the relief of the sobbing rhythm.