Shelley Taylor
Encyclopedia
Shelley Elizabeth Taylor (born 1946) is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles
. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University
, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University
. 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 cognition
and health psychology
. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske
and Shelley Taylor.
Taylor's professional honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association
(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
in 2009.
, an area that was rapidly developing in the 1970s and early 1980s. Much of this work concerned the effects of context and perspective on attribution processes. 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 (e.g. Taylor, 1982). Subsequent work on adaptation and coping in women with breast cancer led to the development of Taylor's theory of cognitive adaptation (Taylor, 1983). Taylor has also conducted research on social comparison processes and on the beneficial effects of positive illusions
(Taylor & Brown, 1988), with a particular focus on the use of self-enhancement
. Taylor has continued to conduct and publish research on social cognition throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
In 1984, Taylor co-authored a book entitled Social Cognition with her student Susan Fiske
. This book became instrumental in defining the scope and ambition of the nascent field of social cognition
. A second edition was published in 1991, and a sequel of sorts entitled Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture appeared in 2007.
(Taylor & Brown, 1988), with a particular focus on the use of self-enhancement
and the self-enhancement bias. 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."
. This work has included research using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), conducted in collaboration with UCLA colleagues Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger (e.g. Eisenberger et al., 2007; Taylor, Burklund et al., 2008; Taylor, Eisenberger et al., 2006), as well as research on the serotonin transporter polymorphism (Taylor, Way et al., 2006) and on plasma oxytocin and vasopressin (Taylor, Gonzaga et al., 2006; Taylor, Saphire-Bernstein & Seeman, 2010).
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. 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
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
: social cognition
Social cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
and health psychology
Health psychology
Health psychology is concerned with understanding how biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural factors are involved in physical health and illness. Health psychologists work alongside other medical professionals in clinical settings, work on behavior change in public health promotion,...
. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske
Susan Fiske
Susan Tufts Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice...
and Shelley Taylor.
Taylor's professional honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States. It is the world's largest association of psychologists with around 154,000 members including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. The APA...
(APA; 1996), the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science
Association for Psychological Science
The Association for Psychological Science , previously the American Psychological Society, is a non-profit international organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in research, application, teaching, and the improvement of...
(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
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
in 2009.
Social Cognition
Taylor's early work addressed classic questions in social cognitionSocial cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
, an area that was rapidly developing in the 1970s and early 1980s. Much of this work concerned the effects of context and perspective on attribution processes. Taylor was among the first to apply the breakthrough work of Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....
and Amos Tversky
Amos Tversky
Amos Nathan Tversky, was a cognitive and mathematical psychologist, a pioneer of cognitive science, a longtime collaborator of Daniel Kahneman, and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement...
on heuristics and biases to the field of social psychology (e.g. Taylor, 1982). Subsequent work on adaptation and coping in women with breast cancer led to the development of Taylor's theory of cognitive adaptation (Taylor, 1983). Taylor has also conducted research on social comparison processes and on the beneficial effects of positive illusions
Positive illusions
Positive illusions are unrealistically favourable attitudes that people have towards themselves. There are three broad kinds: inflated assessment of one's own abilities, unrealistic optimism about the future and an illusion of control...
(Taylor & Brown, 1988), with a particular focus on the use of self-enhancement
Self-enhancement
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem...
. Taylor has continued to conduct and publish research on social cognition throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
In 1984, Taylor co-authored a book entitled Social Cognition with her student Susan Fiske
Susan Fiske
Susan Tufts Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice...
. This book became instrumental in defining the scope and ambition of the nascent field of social cognition
Social cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...
. A second edition was published in 1991, and a sequel of sorts entitled Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture appeared in 2007.
Positive Illusions
Arguably, Taylor's most influential work in social cognition has concerned the use of positive illusionsPositive illusions
Positive illusions are unrealistically favourable attitudes that people have towards themselves. There are three broad kinds: inflated assessment of one's own abilities, unrealistic optimism about the future and an illusion of control...
(Taylor & Brown, 1988), with a particular focus on the use of self-enhancement
Self-enhancement
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem...
and the self-enhancement bias. 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."
Health Psychology
Taylor helped to found the field of health psychology in the 1980s and 1990s, together with UCLA colleague Christine Dunkel-Schetter, former Yale classmate Howard S. Friedman, and other key scholars.Social Neuroscience
Taylor has become a leading figure in the newly emerging field of social neuroscienceSocial neuroscience
Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather...
. This work has included research using functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...
(fMRI), conducted in collaboration with UCLA colleagues Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger (e.g. Eisenberger et al., 2007; Taylor, Burklund et al., 2008; Taylor, Eisenberger et al., 2006), as well as research on the serotonin transporter polymorphism (Taylor, Way et al., 2006) and on plasma oxytocin and vasopressin (Taylor, Gonzaga et al., 2006; Taylor, Saphire-Bernstein & Seeman, 2010).
The Tend-and-Befriend Model
One of Taylor's most significant contributions to psychological science in recent years has been the development of the Tend-and-Befriend model, first described in a Psychological Review article published in the year 2000 (Taylor et al., 2000).Publications
Note: List is selective and includes only highly cited and important works and works cited above.- Eisenberger, N. I., Taylor, S. E., Gable, S. L., Hilmert, C. J., & Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Neural pathways link social support to attenuated neuroendocrine stress responses. Neuroimage, 35, 1601-1612.
- 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. (1983). Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation. American Psychologist, 38, 1161-1173.
- 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.
- Taylor, S. E., Burklund, L. J., Eisenberger, N. I., Lehman, B. J., Hilmert, C. J., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008). Neural bases of moderation of cortisol stress responses by psychosocial resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 197-211.
- Taylor, S. E., Eisenberger, N. I., Saxbe, D., Lehman, B. J., & Lieberman, M. D. (2006). Neural responses to emotional stimuli are associated with childhood family stress. Biological Psychiatry, 60, 296-301.
- Taylor, S. E., Gonzaga, G. C., Klein, L. C., Hu, P., Greendale, G. A., & Seeman, T. E. (2006). Relation of oxytocin to psychological stress responses and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis activity in older women. Psychosomatic Medicine, 68, 238-245.
- Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107, 411-429.
- Taylor, S. E., Saphire-Bernstein, S., & Seeman, T. E. (2010). Are plasma oxytocin in women and plasma vasopressin in men biomarkers of distressed pair-bond relationships? Psychological Science, 21, 3-7.
- Taylor, S. E., Way B. M., Welch, W. T., Hilmert, C. J., Lehman, B. J., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2006). Early family environment, current adversity, the serotonin transporter polymorphism, and depressive symptomatology. Biological Psychiatry, 60, 671-676.