Baldwin native’s research hits mainstream

In her nearly 10 years since graduating Baldwin High School, Jessica Hamilton has accomplished a few things. And as she nears completion of her doctorate degree at Temple University, she plans on accomplishing a few more.

Hamilton, 27, is in Temple’s clinical psychology program and recently gained nationwide notoriety when her research on teenage girls’ stress and depression, based on rumination, was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychological Science and then picked up by major news outlets like, Yahoo!, NBC and ABC.

She’s no stranger to seeing her research published — she had six publications in total before she started graduate school in 2011. Two years later was the first time she had a first-author paper published, meaning she spearheaded the research, in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.

To research her most recent topic, she focused on a study that had 400 adolescents, ages 12-13, come into a Temple lab for regular assessments, like interviews, questionnaires and a life event inventory.

From there, Hamilton looked at different types of stressful events and related them to the development of cognitive vulnerabilities. “Those thinking patterns can lead to depression,” she said, “and so what we don’t know a lot about is how those patterns start to form.”

According to Hamilton, women tend to ruminate, or think deeply about something, more than men. Also, around age 15, a gender difference in depression begins to start, so Hamilton wanted to find out why.

“We know that girls ruminate more later in life and experience more stressful events during adolescent years,” she said. “I said that maybe girls experience more stressful events which then leads to greater rumination, which then leads to more depressive symptoms among girls.”

He research found that girls were exposed to more types of events that ultimately lead to a greater tendency to ruminate. “It’s exciting to find something that makes sense,” she said.