Introduction

Lyn Yvonne Abramson (born 07 February 1950) is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was born in Benson, Minnesota. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 before attaining her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

Refer to Depressive Realism.

Achievements

As a clinical psychologist, her main areas of research interest have been exploring vulnerability to major depressive disorder and psychobiological and cognitive approaches to depression, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders. She was the senior author of the paper “Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation” published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1978, proposing a link between a particular explanatory style and depression.

With her co-authors William T.L. Cox, Patricia Devine, and Steven D. Hollon, she proposed the integrated perspective on prejudice and depression, which combines cognitive theories of depression with cognitive theories of prejudice. Lyn and her co-authors propose that many cases of depression may be caused by prejudice from the self or from another person.

“This depression caused by prejudice – which the researchers call deprejudice — can occur at many levels. In the classic case, prejudice causes depression at the societal level (e.g., Nazis’ prejudice causing Jews’ depression), but this causal chain can also occur at the interpersonal level (e.g., an abuser’s prejudice causing an abusee’s depression), or even at the intrapersonal level, within a single person (e.g., a man’s prejudice against himself causing his depression).”

Along with her frequent collaborator Lauren Alloy, Abramson was awarded the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for 2008–2009 by the Association for Psychological Science. She is on the Institute for Scientific Information list of highly cited researchers.

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