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Richard S. Lazarus was a psychologist who began rising to prominence in the 1960s, when behaviorists like B. F. Skinner held sway over psychology and explanations for human behavior were often pared down to rudimentary motives like reward and punishment. In that world, love or sadness existed, but were considered more ornamental than underpinning.
Lazarus was a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley who was named by American Psychologist as one of the most influential psychologists. He was a pioneer in the study of emotion and stress, especially their relation to cognition.
He was well renowned for his theory of cognitive-mediational theory within emotion.
Lazarus was an unabashed promoter of the importance of emotion, especially what he described as the marriage between emotion and thought. His views put him at odds not only with behaviorism but also with a movement that began toward the end of his career: attempts to explain all human behavior by looking at the structure of the brain. He was very opposed to reductionist approaches to understanding human behavior.
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