Lyn Yvonne Abramson

Lyn Yvonne Abramson (born February 7, 1950) is Professor Emerita of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is known for her work on the learned helplessness and hopelessness in depression, depressive realism, gender differences in depression, and the behavioral approach system (BAS)/reward system hypersensitivity theory of bipolar disorder.

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. In 2025, Abramson and Alloy were awarded the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Impact in Psychology.

Abramson is on the Institute for Scientific Information list of highly cited researchers.

Biography Abramson was born in Benson, Minnesota. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972. She subsequently completed her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1978, where she studied learned helplessness under the supervision of Martin Seligman. In one of her early papers with Seligman titled "Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation", Abramson proposed a link between a particular explanatory style and depression. Abramson and her coauthors propose that many cases of depression may be caused by prejudice from the self or from another person. This work has served as a bridge to adapt clinical psychology methodologies like cognitive behavior therapy for use in combatting prejudice and bias, as Cox and Devine have done in their bias habit-breaking training.

Books Abramson, L. Y., Editor (1988). Social cognition and clinical psychology: A synthesis. Guilford.

Representative publications Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., & Alloy, L. B. (1989). Hopelessness depression: A theory-based subtype of depression. Psychological Review, 96(2), 358–372. Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87(1), 49–74. Abramson, L.Y., Alloy, L.B., Hankin, B.L., Haeffel, G.J., MacCoon, D.G., & Gibb, B.E. (2002). Cognitive vulnerability-stress models of depression in a self-regulatory and psychobiological context. In I.H. Gotlib & C.L. Hammen (Eds.), Handbook of Depression, (pp.268-294). New York: Guilford. Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108(4), 441–485. Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1988). Depressive realism: Four theoretical perspectives. In L. B. Alloy (Ed.), Cognitive processes in depression (pp. 223–265). The Guilford Press.