Elissa Koff

Elissa Koff is the Margaret Hamm Professor of Psychology Emerita at Wellesley College. She taught at Wellesley for 32 years, was Chair of the Psychology Department for 13 years, and served two terms as the Associate Dean of the College. She was on the executive board of the Center for Research on Women, the Wellesley Centers for Women, and the Women’s Studies Program. She was a member of the trustee committee that brought the Center for Research on Women and the Stone Center together under common leadership and chaired the Workload Committee that engineered the reduction of the teaching load to four courses a year. She also directed a Senior Faculty Development Grant from the Mellon Foundation (which awarded grants to senior faculty members seeking to sustain and enliven their professional and personal growth), and established and directed the Junior Faculty Mentoring Program (which matched junior faculty with senior faculty members across disciplines, and both formally and informally mentored new department chairs). 

In 1978, shortly after arriving at Wellesley, she and another junior colleague in the Department of Biological Sciences established the Psychobiology Program, which she subsequently directed for a number of years. This program was one of the first of its kind in an undergraduate institution, and was the predecessor of the current Neuroscience Program. She taught the introductory biopsychology course, as well as seminars in Neuropsychology, the Psychobiology of Emotion, and Psychopharmacology. She was a research associate at the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston VA Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, the Department of Psychiatry at the Mass General Hospital, the Center for Population Studies at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley. She also is a licensed clinical psychologist. 

Her past research focused on the biopsychosocial development of girls and young adult women, perception and expression of emotion in patients with brain damage, and emotion processing and inference of mental states in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, and was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute on Aging. Recent research has focused on relationships between conception risk and bargaining, conception risk and competition and cooperation, effects of mood on the relationship between delay discounting and impulsivity, sexual orientation and body dissatisfaction, sexual orientation and partner preference, and the role of impulsivity and attractiveness in impulse buying behavior.