Shelley E. Taylor
Department of Psychology
1285 Franz Hall, UCLA
Box 951563
Los Angeles, California 90095-1563
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (310) 825-7648
Fax: (310) 206-8940
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Professor Taylor's research lies at the intersection of social cognition and health psychology. One line of work pursues positive illusions, which holds that people have at least three mildly self-enhancing beliefs: self-aggrandizing self-perceptions, an illusion of control, and unrealistic optimism about the future. When confronting certain kinds of traumas or threats, people respond with cognitively adaptive efforts to restore self-esteem, their sense of control, and belief in the future. These positive beliefs are predictive of mental health, as assessed by standardized measures and clinical judgment, and associated with beneficial physical health outcomes. Her program of experimental research identifies the situational parameters that contribute to the functional ebb and flow of these illusions. She is currently pursuing their role in managing the stress of HIV infection among women at risk for or already infected with HIV. Professor Taylor's theoretical and empirical interests represent a blending of the social cognition literature on self-regulation and the stress and coping literature from health psychology. She explores the skills that people develop and deploy for proactive coping, that is, the avoidance or minimization of stressful experiences before they occur. She is interested in the development of a future orientation, planning skills, mental simulation, and goal-setting, which represent proactive coping efforts. This line of work dovetails with a MacArthur SES and Health Planning Initiative in which she also participates. Professor Taylor's most recent work is in the area of social neuroscience. One line of work focuses on female responses to stress and their neuroendocrine underpinnings. Specifically, the goal of the research is to understand the differences in how men and women react to stress, particularly gender differences in neuroendocrine reactivity, memory, anxiety and sociability in response to stress, and the moderation of these responses by estrogen, oxytocin, and vasopressin. The significance of this project derives from its potential to integrate behavioral sex differences in response to stress with potential neuroendocrine underpinnings, and to clarify some of the reasons why women are less likely to show certain deleterious effects of stress than men. Specifically, women are more likely to enlist social support (a health-protective affiliative response), less likely to respond to stress with aggression, and less likely to respond to stress through substance abuse (especially drugs and alcohol), suggesting that their neuroendocrine and/or psychological responses to stress (such as anxiety) may be downregulated, relative to men's. Moreover, women show greater longevity than men in all developed countries. Neuroendocrine and behavioral sex differences in response to stress may underlie these differences. A second line of work (with Rena Repetti and Teresa Seeman) is concerned with the effect of childhood experience on adult risks for mental and physical health problems. The research focuses on risky families, which are characterized by conflict and aggression, by relationships that lack warmth and support, and by parental overregulation or underregulation of children's behavior. These family characteristics create vulnerabilities and/or interact with genetically-based vulnerabilities in offspring that produce disruptions in psychosocial functioning (specifically poor emotion-regulation skills and poor social competence); disruptions in stress-responsive biological regulatory systems, including SAM, HPA, and serotonergic functioning; and poor health behaviors, especially substance abuse. This integrated biobehavioral profile leads to consequent accumulating risk for mental health disorders, major chronic diseases, and early mortality. Each of these two lines of work has generated a program of empirical investigations.
 Books:
 Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2008). Social cognition: From brains to culture. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
- Taylor, S. E. (2009). Health psychology (7th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
- Taylor, S. E., Peplau, L. A., & Sears, D. O. (2006). Social psychology (12th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Journal Articles:
- Aspinwall, L. G., & Taylor, S. E. (1997). A stitch in time: Self-regulation and proactive coping. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 417-436.
- Bower, J. E., Kemeny, M. E., Taylor, S. E., & Fahey, J. L. (1998). Cognitive processing, discovery of meaning, CD 4 decline, and AIDS-related mortality among bereaved HIV-seropositive men. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 979-986.
- Cole, S. W., Kemeny, M. E., Taylor, S. E., & Visscher, B. R. (1997). Social identity and physical health: Accelerated HIV progression in rejection-sensitive gay men. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 320-335.
- Miller, G. E., Kemeny, M. E., Taylor, S. E., & Visscher, B. R. (1997). Social relationships and immune processes in HIV seropositive gay men. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 19, 139-151.
- Pham, L. B., & Taylor, S. E. (1999). From thought to action: Effects of process- versus outcome-based mental simulations on performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 250-260.
- Segerstrom, S. C., Taylor, S. E., Kemeny, M. E., & Fahey, J. L. (1998). Optimism is associated with mood, coping, and immune change in response to stress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1646-1655.
- Taylor, S. E., Kemeny, M. E., Reed, G. M., & Bower, J. E. (1998). Psychosocial influences on course of disease: Predictors of HIV progression. Health Psychology Update, 34, 7-12.
- Taylor, S. E., Pham, L. B., Rivkin, I., & Armor, D. A. (1998). Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation and self-regulation of behavior. American Psychologist, 53, 429-439.
Other Publications:
- Armor, D. A., & Taylor, S. E. (1998). Situated optimism: Specific outcome expectancies and self-regulation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 30, pp. 309-379). New York: Academic Press.
- Taylor, S. E. (1997). The social being in social psychology. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindsey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 4, pp. 58-95). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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