Shelley Taylor
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Shelley Elizabeth Taylor (born 1946) is an American psychologist. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology at the
University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...
. She received her Ph.D. from
Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
, and was formerly on the faculty at
Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of
social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...
: social cognition and
health psychology Health psychology is the study of psychological and behavioral processes in health, illness, and healthcare. The discipline is concerned with understanding how psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and il ...
. Her books include ''The Tending Instinct'' and ''Social Cognition'', the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor. Taylor's professional honours include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the
American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 170,000 members, including scientists, educators, clin ...
(APA; 1996), the William James Fellow Award from the
Association for Psychological Science The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in r ...
(APS; 2001), and the APA's Lifetime Achievement Award, which she received in August 2010. Taylor was inducted into the
United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
in 2009. She was elected to the
American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
in 2018. For 2019 she received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences.


Early life and education

Taylor was born in 1946 in the small village of Mt. Kisco, New York. She was the only child of her father, a history teacher, and her mother, a former pop and jazz pianist turned piano teacher. Before her father became a history teacher, he was a psychiatric nurse. During
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, he was ineligible for service because of
Polio Poliomyelitis ( ), commonly shortened to polio, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Approximately 75% of cases are asymptomatic; mild symptoms which can occur include sore throat and fever; in a proportion of cases more severe ...
, so he volunteered with the
Society of Friends Quakers are people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations. Members refer to each other as Friends after in the Bible, and originally, others referred to them as Quakers ...
and built the first mental hospital in
Eritrea Eritrea, officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa, with its capital and largest city being Asmara. It is bordered by Ethiopia in the Eritrea–Ethiopia border, south, Sudan in the west, and Dj ...
. She grew up in
Chappaqua, New York Chappaqua ( ) is a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of New Castle, in northern Westchester County, New York, United States. It is approximately north of New York City. The hamlet is served by the Chappaqua station of the Metr ...
, about one hour north of New York City near the Connecticut border. Taylor attended Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua. After one of Taylor's high school history teachers received a grant to study psychology, she began teaching psychology to her students instead of history — a life-changing experience for Taylor.


Connecticut College

Taylor began classes at
Connecticut College Connecticut College (Conn) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in New London, Connecticut. Originally chartered as Thames College, it was founded in 1911 as the state's only women's colle ...
in 1964. Influenced by her father's stories, she signed up for an introductory psychology class, which concluded with an offer from the professor to major in the subject. Taylor expected to become a
clinician A clinician is a health care professional typically employed at a skilled nursing facility or clinic. Clinicians work directly with patients rather than in a laboratory, community health setting or in research. A clinician may diagnose, treat a ...
, but after spending a summer with
Volunteers in Service to America AmeriCorps VISTA is a national service program designed to alleviate poverty. President of the United States, President John F. Kennedy originated the idea for VISTA, which was founded as Volunteers in Service to America in 1965, and incorporated ...
working with schizophrenic men, she decided research would be more satisfying. Her first experiment examined women's evaluations of other women who had chosen to go into careers instead of having traditional family roles. With Sara Kiesler as her advisor, Taylor was interested in attending graduate school at either the
University of Rochester The University of Rochester is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded in 1850 and moved into its current campus, next to the Genesee River in 1930. With approximately 30,000 full ...
to work with Elaine Walster or
Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...
to work with David Mettee. She eventually decided on Yale.


Graduate School at Yale

At Yale, she briefly worked with Mettee, but their interests and personal styles did not match. She wanted to work with Richard Nisbett, but his laboratory was full. She eventually did her dissertation research on
attribution theory Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called Attribution theory. Psychological research into ...
with John McConahay. Her dissertation focused on
Daryl Bem Daryl J. Bem (born June 10, 1938) is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude formation and change. He has also researched psi phenomena, group decision ma ...
's
self-perception theory Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. It asserts that people develop their attitudes (when there is no previous attitude due to a lack of experience, etc.—and the emotional resp ...
and addressed whether or not people infer their attitudes from their behavior. She found that false feedback of one's behavior is accepted as a basis for one's attitudes if it is consistent with pre-existing attitudes. While at Yale, she encountered several other people who would be leaders in psychology in the future, such as Mark Zanna, Michael Storms, Ellen Langer,
Carol Dweck Carol Susan Dweck (born October 17, 1946) is an American psychologist. She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on motivation and mindset. She was on the faculty at ...
, James Cutting, Henry Roediger, and Robert Kraut. A very significant person in Taylor's academic career was Kenneth Keniston, a psychiatrist at the
Yale School of Medicine The Yale School of Medicine is the medical school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in 1810 as the Medical Institution of Yale College and formally opened in 1813. It is the sixth-oldest m ...
. He typically did not work with psychology graduate students. Still, after some persuasion, he taught Taylor and some other students about using interviews to generate and test hypotheses. Taylor was also influenced by the women's movement of the 1960s. She joined the New Haven Women's Liberation Movement and helped organize demonstrations, sit-ins, protests, and conferences. She was arrested once for storming Mory's, a Yale club that was originally only open to men. Within months, the policy was changed, and women were allowed. She received her doctorate in social psychology from Yale in 1972. While at Yale, Taylor also met her future husband, architect Mervyn Fernandes. After Yale, she received a position at
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...
.


Harvard

After Yale, Taylor and her husband moved to
Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...
and she worked in Harvard's Psychology and Social Relations Department. She became very interested in social cognition and drew heavily on attribution theory. Taylor was among the first to apply the breakthrough work of
Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; ; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memor ...
and
Amos Tversky Amos Nathan Tversky (; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned th ...
on heuristics and biases to the field of social psychology (Taylor, 1982).


Social cognition

With an undergraduate named Susan Fiske at Harvard, Taylor began a research program on salience and the effects that salience has on people's inferences. In a famous paper, Taylor and Fiske found that "point of view influences perceptions of causality, such that a person who engulfs your visual field is seen as more impactful in a situation...imagining actions from the perspective of a particular character leads to empathetic inference and recall of information best learned from that person's perspectives." Taylor also did other work on salience about stereotyping and cognitive biases. For example, she found that if a person in your field is a token or solitary member of a group, they are more likely to be viewed in stereotyped role than if the person was a member of the majority group and their identity is much more salient. For example, when people observed a group of men and women having a discussion, the viewers organized their recall around gender, such that when people were likely to attribute a comment from one person to another incorrectly, it was usually mixing up a woman's comment with another woman or mixing up a man's comment with another man (Taylor, 1981). Taylor has also contributed to social cognition with her "top of the head phenomena" (Taylor & Fiske, 1978). The top of the head phenomena states, "the more salient an actor is, the more an observer will ascribe a causality to him or her rather than to other less salient actors." For example, in a situation with a clear leader, other actors are focused on the leader and the leader is seen as the cause of an event instead of external events or other actors, even when it is not true. It is hypothesized that people focus mostly on the salience of a person to make snap judgments instead of truly understanding a given situation (Goethals et al., 2004: pg. 59). In 1984, Taylor co-authored a book entitled ''Social Cognition'' with her former student Susan Fiske. This book became instrumental in defining the scope and ambition of the nascent social cognition field. A second edition was published in 1991, and a sequel entitled ''Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture'' appeared in 2007. Taylor has also researched social comparison processes and continues to conduct and publish research on social cognition throughout the 1990s and 2000s.


Health psychology

Around 1976, Taylor was contacted by Judy Rodin to present a social psychological perspective on breast cancer. At the time, however, no research was looking at the links between social psychology and health. So Taylor and a friend with breast cancer at the time, Smadar Levin, decided to explore the connection between social psychology and what is now known as
health psychology Health psychology is the study of psychological and behavioral processes in health, illness, and healthcare. The discipline is concerned with understanding how psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and il ...
. Taylor along with other social psychologists such as Howard Friedman and Christine Dunkel-Schetter were instrumental in the development of health psychology as a specialty. At Harvard, however, it was difficult to pursue health psychology because the medical school was so far from the main campus. Taylor asked the university president at the time, Derek Bok, for some start-up funds to help develop a health psychology program at Harvard. He provided her with a $10,000 check to develop a health psychology interest at Harvard. However, she was passed up for tenure at Harvard and went to the
University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...
.


UCLA

In 1979, she joined the faculty at UCLA, where they were very interested in growing health psychology. In 1981, Taylor applied for and received the
National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...
Research Scientist Development Award to receive additional training in disease processes. It was a 10-year award that allowed her to learn biological assessments and methods. With biological psychologist John Libeskind, Taylor was able to look at stress and its effects on stress regulatory systems. At this time, she became very interested in understanding the coping processes of women with breast cancer so she began interviewing them and their partners about their experiences. Through intensive interviews, Taylor found that some of the women's beliefs were to a degree, illusions. Many women held unrealistic beliefs about their recovery from cancer and their abilities to rid themselves of the cancer. Her research on these women led to the development of Taylor's theory of cognitive adaptation (Taylor, 1983). Cognitive adaptation states that when someone faces a threatening event, their readjustment centers around finding meaning in their experience, gaining control over the situation, and boosting one's self-esteem. This work clearly informed one of her next big topics, positive illusions.


Positive illusions

In 1988, Taylor and a colleague Jonathon Brown published "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological Perspective on Mental Health", one of the most cited social psychology papers ever (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Taylor's research on positive illusions is some of her most influential and well-known work. Taylor has described positive illusions as follows: "Rather than perceiving themselves, the world, and the future accurately, most people regard themselves, their circumstances, and the future as considerably more positive than is objectively likely.... These illusions are not merely characteristic of human thought; they appear to be adaptive, promoting rather than undermining good mental health." Taylor's positive illusion work did elicit a lot of criticism from other social psychologists. For example, Shedler, Mayman, and Manis (1993) reported evidence that positive illusions may not be adaptive. People with overly positive views were maladjusted in clinical interviews. Also, people with this "illusory mental health" have stronger biological responses to stressful tasks. This contradicted Taylor's findings that showed that cancer patients with more positive illusions had lower mortality rates than those without positive illusions. Taylor then did other studies that showed that people with
AIDS The HIV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. Without treatment, it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is a Preventive healthcare, pr ...
who hold positive illusions about their ability to overcome the disease lived longer and were less likely to develop AIDS symptoms over time. Her research on positive illusions was also influential in her personal life. She says "interviewing those women about the insights that came from their disease, so many said that it makes you realize that relationships are the most important thing you have and that children were the most important thing they did with their lives...I went home and talked with my husband, and we thought about having a child." They later had two children, one daughter and one son.


Social neuroscience

In the mid-1990s, Taylor participated in the MacArthur Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health and developed an interest in mechanisms linking psychosocial conditions to health outcomes. In another very popular paper with some UCLA colleagues, Rena Repetti and Teresa Seeman, titled "Health psychology: What is an unhealthy environment and how does it get under the skin?," they explored processes by which environments with different stressors such as poverty, violence exposure, threat, and other chronically stressful events lead to differences in health outcomes by socioeconomic status. Taylor greatly drew on Bruce McEwen's concept of
allostatic load Allostatic load is "the wear and tear on the body" which accumulates as an individual is exposed to repeated or chronic Stress (biology), stress. The term was coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993. It represents the physiological conseq ...
, the cumulative wear and tear on the body. In subsequent work with Repetti and Seeman, Taylor found that risky family environments predict elevated blood pressure and heart rate and an elevated flat cortisol slope in stressful laboratory tasks. Taylor also has interest in social support and how it relates to biology. She has examined cultural and gender differences in social support and how they affect adjustment to stressful life events. She has also found that people with more psychosocial resources have lesser cardiovascular and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal responses to stress. Her interest in social support also influenced her tend-and-befriend model which will be discussed below. Taylor has become a leading figure in the newly emerging field of
social neuroscience Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding the relationship between social experiences and biological systems. Humans are fundamentally a social species, and studies indicate that various social influences, includi ...
. This work has included research using
functional magnetic resonance imaging Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
(fMRI), conducted in collaboration with UCLA colleagues Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger. In one study, they found that kids from risky families and environments have deficits in emotion regulation in response to stressful circumstance that can be seen at the neural level (Taylor, Eisenberger, Saxbe, Lehman, & Lieberman, 2006). In another, they found that high levels of social support are crucial to attenuating neuroendocrine responses to stress through less activation of particular brain areas such as the dACC and Brodmann's area 8 (Eisenberger, Taylor, Gable, Hillmert, & Lieberman, 2007). They have done more research on the serotonin transporter polymorphism (Taylor, Way et al., 2006) and on plasma oxytocin and
vasopressin Mammalian vasopressin, also called antidiuretic hormone (ADH), arginine vasopressin (AVP) or argipressin, is a hormone synthesized from the ''AVP'' gene as a peptide prohormone in neurons in the hypothalamus, and is converted to AVP. It ...
(Taylor, Gonzaga et al., 2006; Taylor, Saphire-Bernstein & Seeman, 2010).


Tend and befriend model

In 2000, Taylor and colleagues developed the
tend and befriend Tend-and-befriend is a purported behavior exhibited by some animals, including humans, in response to threat. It refers to protection of offspring (tending) and seeking out their social group for mutual defense (befriending). In evolutionary psyc ...
model of responses to stress. This model contrasts with the "
fight-or-flight response The fight-or-flight or the fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn (also called hyperarousal or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. It was first describ ...
" which states that in the face of a harmful stressor, we either face it or run from it. Instead, tend and befriend evolves from an evolutionary perspective and asserts that "people, especially women, evolved social means for dealing with stress that involved caring for offspring and protecting them from harm and turning to the social group for protection for the self and offspring." Taylor hypothesized that fight or flight would not be as evolutionarily adaptive for women as for men because women typically have young children. Regan Gurung, a colleague of Taylor's and a developer of the theory, once stated: "The 'fight or flight' model is based on the very simple assumption that our bodies prepare us for action to either fight with a foe or to run away from it. However, from an evolutionary standpoint, women evolved as caregivers; applying the same 'fight or flight' model, if women fight and lose, they leave an infant behind. By the same token, if they flee, it's a lot harder to flee if you are carrying an infant, and you won't leave the infant behind." So, females may form tight social bonds to seek out friends in times of stress. Research by Taylor and Repetti has found that during times of stress, women typically spend more time tending to vulnerable offspring while men were more likely to withdraw from family life.
Oxytocin Oxytocin is a peptide hormone and neuropeptide normally produced in the hypothalamus and released by the posterior pituitary. Present in animals since early stages of evolution, in humans it plays roles in behavior that include Human bonding, ...
, a female reproductive hormone typically involved in pair bonding and
endorphins Endorphins (contracted from endogenous morphine) are peptides produced in the brain that block the perception of pain and increase feelings of wellbeing. They are produced and stored in the pituitary gland of the brain. Endorphins are endogeno ...
, proteins that alleviate pain, are hypothesized to be the biological mechanisms by which we tend and befriend. From this area of research, Taylor wrote "The Tending Instinct: Women, Men, and the Biology of Relationships".


Publications

''Note: List is selective and includes only highly cited and important works and works cited above.''


Books

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Chapters in books

*Taylor, S. E. (1981). A categorization approach to stereotyping. In D. L. Hamilton (Ed.) ''Cognitive processes in stereotyping and intergroup behavior'' (pp. 83–114). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. *Taylor, S. E. (1982). The availability bias in social perception and interaction. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic & A. Tversky (Eds.) ''Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases'' (pp. 190–200). New York: Cambridge University Press. *Taylor, S. E. (2008). From social psychology to neuroscience and back. In R. Levine, A. Rodrigues & L. Zelezny (Eds.) ''Journeys in Social Psychology: Looking Back to Inspire the Future'' (pp. 39–54). New York: Psychology Press. *Goethals, G. R., Sorenson, G. J., & Burns, J. M. (Eds.). (2004). ''Encyclopedia of leadership: AE (Vol. 1).'' Sage.


Journal articles

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References


External links


American Psychological Association winners of Distinguished Scientific Contribution AwardTaylor Lab at UCLA
{{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor, Shelley 21st-century American psychologists American women psychologists 20th-century American psychologists American social psychologists Connecticut College alumni Yale University alumni Harvard University Department of Psychology faculty University of California, Los Angeles faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences People from Chappaqua, New York 1946 births Living people Members of the American Philosophical Society Horace Greeley High School alumni Corresponding fellows of the British Academy American women academics 21st-century American women Members of the National Academy of Medicine APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology recipients