Sheldon Cohen

Last updated
Sheldon Cohen
Born (1947-10-11) October 11, 1947 (age 76)
CitizenshipAmerican
Education
Known for Perceived Stress Scale
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Psychology, social psychology
Institutions
Website CMU.edu/Dietrich/Psychology/People/Core-Training-Faculty/Cohen-Sheldon

Sheldon Cohen (born October 11, 1947) is the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the director of the Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease. He is a member of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon and adjunct professor of Psychiatry and of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Contents

Background

Cohen received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from Monteith College at Wayne State University (Detroit) in 1969, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from New York University in 1973. [1] [2] He was Assistant to associate professor of psychology at the University of Oregon from 1973 through 1982, and has been a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) since 1982. [3] He was named the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology in 2003. Since 1990 he has also been an adjunct professor of Pathology and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as well as a member of the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute; from 1999 to 2010 he served as a member of the executive board of the National Institutes of Health Pittsburgh Mind-Body Center. In 1992 he served as the interim director of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's Behavioral Medicine Program and was the co-director of Pittsburgh's Brain, Behavior, and Immunity Center from 1990 to 1999. He was also a member of the core groups of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health and of the Fetzer Institute's Working Group on Psychosocial Factors in Asthma, and served as chair of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Planning Group on Social Connectedness and Health.

Cohen was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. He is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (2004), the American Psychological Society's (Now Association for Psychological Science) James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Research in Applied Psychology (2002), the APA's (Division 38) Award for Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology as a Junior (1987) and Senior (2008) Investigator, the American Psychosomatic Society's Patricia R. Barchas Award for Significant Contributions to the Study of the Impact of Social Behavior on Physiology (2006). He has received the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Scientist Development (1987–1997), and Senior Scientist Awards (1997–2002). He was an American Psychological Association Distinguished Lecturer, and a British Psychological Association Senior Fellow Lecturer. His paper entitled "Social Support, Stress and the Buffering Hypothesis" [4] was named a Current Contents Citation Classic; in 2003 he was named one of Science's Most Cited Authors by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Cohen's work focuses on the roles of stress, emotions, social support systems and personality [5] in health and well-being. [6] [7] [8] [9] He published pioneering theoretical and empirical work on the effects of aircraft noise on health and development of schoolchildren, [10] [11] and on the roles of stress and social networks [12] [13] in physical and mental health. [14] [15] [16] [17] With colleagues he has developed a number of scales assessing psychological and social variables including the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), the Interpersonal Support Evaluation Scale (ISEL), the Social Network Index (SNI), the Partner Interaction Questionnaire (PIQ) and the Cohen-Hoberman Inventory of Physical Symptoms (CHIPS). [18] [19] Over the last 30 years he has studied the effects of psychological [20] stress, [21] [22] [23] [24] social support, [25] and social status on immunity and susceptibility to infectious disease. [26] [27] [28] This work attempts to identify the neuroendocrine, immune, [29] and behavioral [30] [31] [32] [33] pathways that link stress, personality, [34] [35] [36] and social networks to disease susceptibility. [37] [38] [39] He is also involved in studies of the effects of psychosocial factors on the onset and progression of asthma, and on the effectiveness of social support interventions in facilitating psychological adjustment and disease progression in women with breast cancer. His current work focuses on how interpersonal dispositions and behaviors influence immunity, host resistance to infectious disease, and on identifying biological pathways linking stress to disease. [40] [41] [42] His research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, [43] the Journal of the American Medical Association, [44] [45] [46] [41] the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, [47] and the American Journal of Public Health [48] in addition to other medical, public health, and sociology journals as well as in numerous psychology journals. [49]

Awards and memberships

See also

Related Research Articles

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References

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  2. Plous, Scott. Sheldon Cohen . Retrieved February 9, 2019.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  3. "Sheldon Cohen – ORCID". ORCID.org. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
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  8. Pressman, SD; Cohen S (November 2005). "Does positive affect influence health?". Psychological Bulletin. 131 (6): 925–971. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.925. PMID   16351329. S2CID   7069750.
  9. Cohen, S., Evans, G. W., Krantz, D. S., & Stokols, D. (1986). Behavior, health and environmental stress. New York: Plenum.
  10. Cohen, S; Evans GW; Krantz DS; Stokols D (March 1980). "Physiological, motivational, and cognitive effects of aircraft noise on children: moving from the laboratory to the field" (PDF). American Psychologist. 35 (3): 231–243. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.35.3.231. PMID   7377650.
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  19. Cohen, S., Kessler, R. C., & Underwood Gordon, L. (Eds.) (1995). Measuring stress: A guide for health and social scientists. New York: Oxford.
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  41. 1 2 Cohen, S; Janicki-Deverts D; Turner RB; Casselbrant ML; Li-Korotky H; Epel ES; Doyle WJ (February 20, 2013). "Association between telomere length and experimentally induced upper respiratory viral infection in healthy adults". Journal of the American Medical Association. 309 (7): 699–705. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.613. PMC   3786437 . PMID   23423415.
  42. Cohen, S; Janicki-Deverts D; Doyle WJ; Miller GE; Frank E; Rabin BS; Turner RB (April 17, 2012). "Chronic stress, glucocorticoid receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (16): 5995–5999. Bibcode:2012PNAS..109.5995C. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1118355109 . PMC   3341031 . PMID   22474371.
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  48. Cohen, S; Tyrrell DA; Russell MA; Jarvis MJ; Smith AP (September 1993). "Smoking, alcohol consumption, and susceptibility to the common cold". American Journal of Public Health. 83 (9): 1277–1283. doi:10.2105/AJPH.83.9.1277. PMC   1694990 . PMID   8363004.
  49. Cohen, S; Lichtenstein E; Prochaska JO; Rossi JS; Gritz ER; Carr CR; Orleans CT; Schoenbach VJ; Biener L; Abrams D (November 1989). "Debunking myths about self-quitting. Evidence from 10 prospective studies of persons who attempt to quit smoking by themselves". American Psychologist. 44 (11): 1355–1365. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.44.11.1355. PMID   2589730. S2CID   27409978.
  50. "Sheldon Cohen: award for distinguished scientific contributions". American Psychologist. 59 (8): 673–675. November 2004. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.59.8.673a. PMID   15554820.
  51. Diener, Ed; Oishi, Shigehiro; Park, Jungyeun (August 2014). "An incomplete list of eminent psychologists of the modern era". Archives of Scientific Psychology. 2 (1): 20–31. doi: 10.1037/arc0000006 .