The WFF has lost a dear friend with the passing of Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, the chair of the Department of Psychology at Yale. The WFF will be planting a tree in her memory.
The Yale Daily News has published a piece about her passing. The New York Times also has a recent article in honor of her life and work. The article explains how truly groundbreaking Susan’s work was:
“Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men.”
Our hearts especially go out to her husband, Richard, and son, Michael. Susan will be deeply missed by family, friends, colleagues, and students.