Lynn O'Connor, Ph.D.
Half-Time Institute Faculty
loconnor@wi.edu
Emotion Personality and Altruism Research Group - www.eparg.org
B.A. Sociology, San Francisco State University, 1969
Ph.D. Clinical Psychology, The Wright Institute, 1991
Dr. O'Connor is an educator, researcher and clinician, and Director of the Emotion, Personality and Altruism Research Group (EPARG) at the Wright Institute. As a clinician and clinical super-visor,
Dr. O'Connor practices from a biopsychosocial perspective, using positive relational theory. Her training included emergency psychiatry, as well as brief and long-term psychotherapy at Mount Zion, Department of Psychiatry. Dr. O'Connor cofacilitated a weekly Psychotherapy Research Seminar with Joseph Weiss from 1992 to 2000.
She served as a consultant and evaluator for Walden House, and a Research Associate at the Haight-Ashbury Detoxification and Aftercare Project. Since 1996, she has worked as an evaluator in other settings, including serving as Director of Evaluation at the Wright Institute from 1998 – 2004. Dr. O'Connor helped to found and served as Clinical and Research Director of a Pre- and Postdoctoral Internship Training Program and Clinic at the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group from 2001 to 2004. She is on the editorial board of a new journal, Terrorism Research. She currently has a small private practice in San Francisco, and provides consultation for Bay Area psychotherapists.
Dr. O'Connor's current research, testing out evolutionary theories, focuses on survivor guilt, altruism and positive motivation, from a cross-cultural perspective. In addition, she is studying psychopathology and personality or temperament as related to neurotransmitters. Her research group, EPARG, includes professionals from other institutions and disciplines including psychiatrists and evolutionary biologists as well as Wright Institute students, and is funded by private foundations. The EPARG web site address is: www.eparg.org. Students working with Dr. O'Connor have been conducting their dissertation research online for the past several years. Recent dissertations that have been conducted under the auspices of Dr. O'Connor and EPARG are listed on the web site.
In 2001, Dr. O'Connor received the Raymond D. Fowler Award from the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) for her outstanding contributions to graduate students' professional development. In 2006, Dr. O'Connor's contributions to contemporary feminism were recognized in a biographical entry in Feminists Who Changed America, 1963 – 1975, Barbara J. Love, editor.