Shelley Elizabeth Taylor (born 1946) is a distinguished professor of psychology at the
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...
. She received her Ph.D. from
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
, and was formerly on the faculty at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
. 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 scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the ...
:
social cognition
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interacti ...
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 illn ...
. Her books include ''The Tending Instinct'' and ''Social Cognition'', the latter by
Susan Fiske
Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, ...
and Shelley Taylor.
Taylor's professional honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
(APA; 1996), the William James Fellow Award from the
Association for Psychological Science (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), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 2018. For 2019 she received the
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards () are an international award programme recognizing significant contributions in the areas of scientific research and cultural creation. The categories that make up the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ...
in Social Sciences.
Early life
Shelley Taylor was born in 1946 in the small village of
Mt. Kisco, New York. She was the only child to 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
Psychiatric nursing or mental health nursing is the appointed position of a nurse that specialises in mental health, and cares for people of all ages experiencing mental illnesses or distress. These include: neurodevelopmental disorders, schizophr ...
. During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, he was ineligible for service because of
Polio
Poliomyelitis, commonly shortened to polio, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Approximately 70% of cases are asymptomatic; mild symptoms which can occur include sore throat and fever; in a proportion of cases more severe s ...
, so he volunteered with the
Society of Friends and built the first mental hospital in
Eritrea. 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 Metro ...
, about 1 hour north of New York City near the Connecticut border. Taylor attended
Horace Greeley High School
Horace Greeley High School is a public, four-year secondary school serving students in grades 9– 12 in Chappaqua, New York, United States. It is part of the Chappaqua Central School District.
It is consistently ranked among the top high scho ...
in Chappaqua. While in high school, one of her history teachers received a grant from the school to study psychology over the summer. When the school year began instead of teaching history, she taught psychology and it was a life changing experience for her and a lot of her classmates.
College
Taylor began classes at
Connecticut College
Connecticut College (Conn College or Conn) is a private liberal arts college in New London, Connecticut. It is a residential, four-year undergraduate institution with nearly all of its approximately 1,815 students living on campus. The college w ...
in 1964. She enrolled in both history and psychology courses but was leaning more towards history. However, the instructor for her Introductory Psychology Course informed her that her performance in class indicated that she should pursue psychology. When she objected, he responded "You'd be a terrible historian." After that encounter, Taylor became a psychology major. She originally wanted to be a
clinician, but after spending a summer with
Volunteers in Service to America
AmeriCorps VISTA is a national service program designed to alleviate poverty. President John F. Kennedy originated the idea for VISTA, which was founded as Volunteers in Service to America in 1965, and incorporated into the AmeriCorps network of ...
where she worked with mostly older and heavily medicated Schizophrenic men, she did not feel as though it was satisfying and decided to do research. 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
Sara Beth (Greene) Kiesler is the Hillman Professor Emerita of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a program director in the Directorate for Soci ...
as her advisor, Taylor was interested in attending graduate school at either the University of Rochester to work with Elaine Walster or Yale 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 were not a match. She wanted to work with Richard Nisbett but his laboratory was full. She eventually did her dissertation research on
attribution theory 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 ...
's
self-perception theory 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
Ellen Jane Langer (; born March 25, 1947) is an American professor of psychology at Harvard University; in 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Langer studies the illusion of control, decision-making, agi ...
,
Carol Dweck
Carol Susan Dweck (born October 17, 1946) is an American psychologist. She is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on motivation and mindset. She was on the faculty at Columbia ...
, 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 graduate medical school at 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.
The primary te ...
. He typically did not work with psychology graduate students, but after some persuasion, he taught Taylor and some other students about using interviews as a tool 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 club at Yale that originally was 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
After Yale, Taylor and her husband moved to
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...
and she worked in Harvard's
Psychology and Social Relations Department. At this time, she became very interested in
social cognition
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interacti ...
and drew heavily on attribution theory. Taylor was among the first to apply the breakthrough work of
Daniel Kahneman and
Amos Tversky on heuristics and biases to the field of social psychology (Taylor, 1982).
Social cognition
With an undergraduate by the name of
Susan Fiske
Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, ...
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 with regard to 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 incorrectly attribute a comment from one person to another, 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 also has made contributions to social cognition with her "top of the head phenomena" (Taylor & Fiske, 1978). The top of the head phenomena states that "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 as opposed to 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 as opposed to 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
Susan Tufts Fiske (born August 19, 1952) is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, ...
. This book became instrumental in defining the scope and ambition of the nascent field of
social cognition
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interacti ...
. A second edition was published in 1991, and a sequel of sorts entitled ''Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture'' appeared in 2007. Taylor has also conducted research on
social comparison
Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centers on the belief that there is a drive within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their own o ...
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 do a presentation on a social psychological perspective on breast cancer. At the time, however, there was not any research 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 illn ...
. 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
Derek Curtis Bok (born March 22, 1930) is an American lawyer and educator, and the former president of Harvard University.
Life and career
Bok was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Following his parents' divorce, he, his mother, brother and siste ...
, for some start-up funds to help develop a health psychology program at Harvard. He provided her with a $10,000 dollar 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 land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...
.
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, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
Research Scientist Development Award so that she could 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. A lot of the 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 of all time (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Taylor's research on
positive illusions is some of her most influential and well-known work. Taylor has described the use of 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 actually 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 actually maladjusted in clinical interviews. Also, people with this "illusory mental health" have stronger biological responses to stressful tasks. This was contradictory to 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 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 was participating 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. The term was coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993. It represents the physiological consequences of chro ...
, 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, rather than solitary. As such, '' Homo sapiens'' create eme ...
. This work has included research using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), conducted in collaboration with UCLA colleagues
Matthew Lieberman Matthew Dylan Lieberman is a Professor and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Director at UCLA Department of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.
Personal life and education
Lieberman was born on May 5, 1970 in Atlantic City, New Jer ...
and
Naomi Eisenberger
Naomi I. Eisenberger (born in San Francisco) is a social psychologist known for her research on the neural basis of social pain and social connection. She is professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where ...
. 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
Human 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 then trave ...
(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 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 psychology, ten ...
model of responses to stress. This model contrasts with the "
fight-or-flight response
The fight-or-flight or the fight-flight-or-freeze response (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 des ...
" 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, then they are leaving 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're not going to 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, a female reproductive hormone typically involved in pair bonding and
endorphins, 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
*
*
*
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
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
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
Social psychologists
Connecticut College alumni
Yale University alumni
Harvard University 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