Professor Yael Benyamini
Yael Benyamini, PhD, is a health psychologist and a Professor at the Bob Shapell School of Social Work at the Tel Aviv University. She attained her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Biology and her Master's degree in Social Psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and her PhD in Health and Social Psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
She is an elected Honorary Fellow of the European Health Psychology Society. Professor Benyamini studies how people think about their health: Her research interests are in perceptions of health and illness and their effects on the ensuing ways of coping and physical and mental health outcomes, with a special focus on women's reproductive health issues. Her studies in this area investigated women's perceptions of childbirth and choices of modes of delivery, the factors related to them and their association with the subjective and objective experience of childbirth and its implications on postpartum adjustment, as well as studies on coping with infertility, high-risk pregnancy, and miscarriage.
She has authored over 120 publications, cited over 17,000 times altogether. She co-edited the 2016 book on Assessment in Health Psychology and several special issues, among them an issue on Women’s Reproductive Health in Sociocultural Context published in 2017 in International Journal of Behavioral Medicine and a research topic on Perinatal Mental Health: Expanding the Focus to the Family Context published this year in Frontiers in Psychiatry.