The University of Wisconsin is a center for research on depression. A number of faculty in the Psychology and Psychiatry Departments, many of whom have joint appointments in the two departments, investigate the developmental origins, underlying psychological and biological processes, prevention, and treatment of this disorder. We study depression over the lifespan and look at how culture, ethnicity, and gender affect its manifestation. An important theme cutting across our work is that it is as important to understand what protects people from depression as what makes them vulnerable to depression. We conduct basic psychological and biological research on the mechanisms involved in maintaining a nondepressed or positive affective state. Our research involves a wide variety of participants including children, adolescents, college students, community members, and psychiatric patients as well as non-human primates and rats. We conduct laboratory, clinical, intervention, prospective, and naturalistic studies.
