Profile of Shelley E. Taylor
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PROFILE Profile of Shelley E. Taylor he first psychology experiment the feedback was completely discrepant Shelley Taylor conducted as an to reality, study participants rejected it undergraduate at Connecticut out of hand. However, if the feedback was T — College in New London, Con- close say that they were most attracted necticut, turned her on to the thrill that to the second or third person on their comes from collecting and analyzing data. list—they accepted the information and “I was transported,” says the University reevaluated their assessment. of California Los Angeles distinguished After completing her doctorate in 1972, professor of social psychology. That re- Taylor moved to Harvard University search experience led her to graduate (Cambridge, MA) to be part of the de- school at Yale University’s (New Haven, partment of social relations, which was an CT) psychology department and eventu- interdisciplinary collaboration between ally to an illustrious career in research psychology, sociology, and anthropology. psychology, highlighted by her role as one “I liked the broad scope of the depart- of the founders of social cognition, health ment and the interdisciplinary focus,” psychology, and social neuroscience. she says. Elected to the Institute of Medicine in Her first student at Harvard was an 2003 and the National Academy of Sci- undergraduate named Susan Fiske, with ences in 2009 and awarded the American whom Taylor has collaborated since that Psychological Association’s Lifetime time. “I’ve had lasting relationships with ” Achievement Award in 2010, Taylor is a number of students, says Taylor. “ well known for her work showing that With Susan, we became close friends, people tend to hold positive illusions of and she always brought something to the research other than what I brought, which themselves and that it can be healthy to ” do so, the mechanisms by which stress af- made collaboration very fruitful. fects health, and the influence that early Shelley E. Taylor. Together, they worked to expand the nascent field of social cognition, which experiences can have on how our bodies examines the ways people think about process stress. other people and the influences on those In her Inaugural Article (1), she reviews in 1964. But at the end of Psychology 101, the instructor invited her and two other thoughts. In fact, in 1984, they coauthored findings from her own laboratory and students to become psychology majors. the Bible of social cognition, Social Cog- those of others to provide an overview of The offer was such a flattering one that nition (3), in which they defined the scope the research linking stress to physical and Taylor decided to take it with the thought and ambition of the field. In 1991, they mental health. “I wanted the PNAS audi- that she would eventually become published a second edition (4), and in ence to see that you can bring biology a clinician. 2007, they completed a sequel titled So- and behavior together to look at a specific That plan changed after a summer as cial Cognition: From Brains to Culture (5). problem,” she says. a volunteer in a Volunteers in Service Much of Taylor’s work at Harvard in- – Hooked on the Thrill of Discovery to America (VISTA) pilot project working volved the issue of salience (6 8): the in a mental hospital. “I was assigned to idea that people believe something is Taylor was born in 1946 in the small vil- a ward of schizophrenic men, mostly more important if it stands out. She and lage of Mt. Kisco, New York. She grew up older and heavily medicated,” recalls her students tested this idea in a series of in nearby Chappaqua, New York, about Taylor. “As a clinical experience, it wasn’t experiments in which they asked study 1 hour north of New York City and near very satisfying. And when I came back, I participants to act out scripted inter- the Connecticut border. Chappaqua was decided I wanted to do research.” actions with other participants. Typically, a wonderful place to grow up as an only After completing her first study on someone in the group was different in child, she says, because her neighborhood women’s roles in society, she was hooked some way—an African-American among was full of children. Her mother taught on research. By the time graduation Caucasians or a Caucasian among Afri- piano, her father taught history, and al- loomed, she had decided to attend grad- can-Americans, for example. The studies though Taylor liked science in school, she uate school to become a research psy- showed that people are more likely to liked to read more and imagined herself chologist. She applied and got accepted think that someone who is more salient is a librarian for much of her childhood. to Yale’s renowned psychology program, controlling the situation, and they are, ’ Her father s experience as a psychiatric where she was attracted to the fledgling therefore, more likely to stereotype them, nurse during World War II, which he social attribution work of Dick Nisbett. a finding that, in part, explains why peo- fi spoke of often, led Taylor to take her rst “I was interested in exploring how ple tend to stereotype people who are psychology course in college. people understand the causes of their different from themselves. ’ ” fi — own and others behaviors, says Taylor. He built the rst mental hospital in Eritrea For her dissertation (2), she asked study Moving into Health Psychology literally built it by hand with two friends and Near the end of Taylor’s 7 years at Har- villagers—to treat shell-shocked soldiers. It participants to rank order a list of people was hearing him talk about those experi- in terms of attractiveness. Then, she gave vard, Judy Rodin, who was then on the ences that led me to take a psychology them false feedback about how they re- faculty at Yale, was consulting with course as one of my first courses in college. acted physiologically to pictures of the people they had ranked. The feedback That vague interest in psychology was suggested that they were more attracted This is a Profile of a recently elected member of the Na- the only plan she had when she started at to people lower down on their list than tional Academy of Sciences to accompany the member’s Connecticut College (New London, CT) their rankings indicated. She found that if Inaugural Article on page 8507 in issue 19 of volume 107. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1015740107 PNAS | November 23, 2010 | vol. 107 | no. 47 | 20153–20155 Downloaded by guest on September 26, 2021 a West Coast cancer foundation and Indeed, many of the women in Taylor’s says Taylor, “and subsequently, we asked Taylor to write a position paper on breast cancer study claimed to have broadened out from there to look at what psychology had to say about man- mastery over their disease even when it the immune system and proinflamatory aging breast cancer. was clear, to Taylor and others, that their cytokines.” prognosis was grim. Even more fascinat- They found that stress affects how the I told her, “Nothing.” But I wrote the posi- ing, says Taylor, was that they were not body responds to stress (12–15). “We’ve tion paper anyway and decided that it was devastated when the cancer returned. “It been able to show things like people who nuts that psychology didn’t have a foothold was the first time I realized that there are optimistic and feel good about in the medical field. There was so much we are positive illusions,” she says. “This is themselves confront stressful situations could speak to, from adjusting to chronic what spawned the positive illusions work, with lower biological responses to stress,” illness to adhering to treatment regimens. which moved beyond how people react to says Taylor. If you multiply that moder- trauma and asked, ‘What about ated response by years and years and Taylor summarized her ideas about how everyday thought?’” multiple stress events, Taylor believes, social psychology could inform medical The idea that positive illusions—being you’ll get less cumulative damage. That’s practice in an influential paper that helped fi unrealistically optimistic, exaggerating an idea that she credits to neuroscientist jumpstart the eld of health psychology your sense of personal control, or exag- Bruce McEwen, who first suggested that (9). In fact, the president of Harvard at gerating your sense of self—could be people can move from compromised the time, Derek Bok, was so taken with adaptive rather than maladaptive was stress regulation to disease through an ’ Taylor s ideas, he provided her seed counterintuitive at the time, says Taylor. accumulation of smaller stressful events. money for a health psychology course. “I Her first paper laying out the concept and This work connecting stress to biology talked to him about what I wanted to do, showing evidence for positive illusions got Taylor thinking about what environ- and he gave me a check for $10,000,” says was the most cited paper in psychology mental factors affect stress regulation. Her Taylor. “It was great to have that kind for a time (11). Since then, Taylor and her UCLA colleague, Rena Repetti, pointed of confidence.” colleagues have shown that positive illu- out that study after study showed that Despite that support, Taylor was passed sions are associated with both mental and certain childhood characteristics related up for tenure, and therefore, in 1979, she physical health outcomes. to certain outcomes. For example, studies accepted a position at the University of Along with the influences that the showed that children growing up in low California Los Angeles (UCLA).