Prof. Ellen Wright (PSYC) has had a meaningful impact on the education of many students through her role as the Undergraduate Advising Head for the Psychology department at Brandeis. Wright’s personal expertise lies in the area of the “intersection between clinical psychology, depression, gender, development, and emotional regulation.” Throughout her time at Brandeis, Wright has played a pivotal role in supporting a variety of honors and masters students, as well as teaching and guiding undergraduate students through the process of declaring and completing psychology majors, which is listed as one of the most popular at the University according to the U.S. News and World Report. 

Wright began her educational journey as a first generation college student, she told The Justice in an interview on Dec. 2. She explained that she started out with dreams of pursuing a career as a veterinarian, but “couldn’t stand to euthanize the animals.” Instead, she was encouraged to pursue the path of teaching. However, as a senior about to make the jump to student teaching in a science classroom, Write took a class that changed her life. 

“I thought it was too late … but psychology kept grabbing me, so I kept taking classes on the side while I taught biology,” Wright shared. 

This path led her to ultimately pursue a Clinical Psychology program at the University of Iowa, an internship at Franciscan Children’s Hospital and a job teaching at Simmons University and running a depression prevention project while completing a dissertation. After 14 years passed, Prof. Margie Lachman (PSYC) ran an advertisement for a position in the Psychology department at Brandeis, and Wright “took it and fell in love.” Wright told The Justice, “More than 18 years later, here I am still.”

The Brandeis website specifies Wright’s specific area of expertise as “gender and developmental differences in and risks for depression; risk, resiliency and depression prevention; emotional regulation, self-focused attention, rumination and reflection; coping, and development; psychosomatic obstetrics and gynecology and affective disorders (i.e., postpartum depression and premenstrual dysphoric disorder).” 

Wright explained to The Justice that she was partially inspired to pursue this line of research due to her dissertation advisor at the University of Iowa, Mike O’Hara. O’Hara’s research “was focused on postpartum depression and [he] was the first one to demonstrate that the postpartum period of time is not a time of greater risk for depression and that the risk wasn’t from hormones.” Additionally, University of Iowa Professor Don Fowles taught experimental psychopathology, and from him, Wright explained she “was learning to ask more comprehensive questions about the phenomena we studied.” 

Wright shared that prior to her enrollment in the University of Iowa graduate program, she taught science to junior high students, and “[has] always had an interest in the developmental area.” She explained that she realized “there was a whole area of mood disorders that people always thought female, when they thought about disorders — depression in the postpartum period, [Premenstrual Syndrome], depression, and often people decided it was because of our hormones.” This, coupled with the research of O’Hara, inspired Wright to delve deeper with her masters thesis. 

Following the completion of the thesis, Wright “realized that none of the explanations for why people generally got depressed … really explained the gender differences, and the few that did, didn’t explain why depression rates are low in childhood but that skyrocketed in adolescence/around puberty.” Around the time of the thesis completion, Yale University Prof. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema proposed a new theory about gender and depression that was centered around the emotional regulation strategy of rumination. According to Wright, Nolen-Hoeksema argued “that none of the traditional explanations for the sex differences in depressive disorders have good evidence — i.e., hormones, genetics, learned helplessness, gender role stereotypes — but that females do tend to be pushed to internalize and mull over things (i.e., rumination).” 

At the same time as this theory was proposed, social psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski “argued that depression could represent a strategy for solving problems when you fail that goes awry.” This led Wright to come to the conclusion that “self-reflective capacity emerges in adolescence and particularly with puberty,” and this realization resulted in her “[designing] a study where [she] could manipulate the failure and success and examine whether that process did emerge with puberty and did so differently for males and females.” 

When asked to share about a study that she has supervised at Brandeis, Wright detailed the work done by Sophie Brickman ’16. Brickman was an honors student of Wright who “did a 3 follow-up study to folks who were involved around the Boston Marathon bombing and looked for lingering post-traumatic stress and anxiety symptoms, but also for post-traumatic growth and the process that might produce either reaction.” In addition to explaining that this is one of the studies she has supervised that has received the most press attention, Wright stated that “what stood out from that one was Sophie’s emphasis on growth and not just risk and the valuable contributions that can happen when we are faced with the inevitable distress if we learn how to make good choices — and also have good fortune.” 

Wright shared that she has “had a tremendous amount of great students that have done a lot of really interesting research and now are professionals in the field and I feel really blessed!” When asked about students who are interested in becoming involved, she advised that they start looking into research now. Wright advised searching department links for how to get involved and looking for local research efforts in the Waltham area as well as student’s hometowns to find internship opportunities. She encouraged “develop a questioning and curious mind — those are the kinds of activities that get one into research.” Wright shared that while her brother would say that she is “nosy and curious,” she sees it as an interest in digging into complex ideas and advised that students who ask questions will thrive in research settings.