During World War II, he was ineligible for service because of Polio, so he volunteered with the Society of Friends and built the first mental hospital in Eritrea.
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.
[11] Taylor expected to become a clinician, but after spending a summer with Volunteers in Service to America working with schizophrenic men, she decided research would be more satisfying.
Her dissertation focused on Daryl Bem's self-perception theory and addressed whether or not people infer their attitudes from their behavior.
[14] 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, 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.
She joined the New Haven Women's Liberation Movement and helped organize demonstrations, sit-ins, protests, and conferences.
[17] After Yale, Taylor and her husband moved to Cambridge and she worked in Harvard's Psychology and Social Relations Department.
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.
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.
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.
Taylor asked the university president at the time, Derek Bok, for some start-up funds to help develop a health psychology program at Harvard.
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.
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.
These illusions are not merely characteristic of human thought; they appear to be adaptive, promoting rather than undermining good mental health.
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?,"[25] 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, the cumulative wear and tear on the body.
She has examined cultural and gender differences in social support and how they affect adjustment to stressful life events.
This work has included research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (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).
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.
[30] 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.