Culture and Individual Adaptation

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This project studies the influence of culture on individual adaptationthrough investigating cultural, social-psychological and dietary influenceson individual differences in physiological and psychological adaptation.Individual differences in variables such as blood pressure, serum lipids,anxiety and depression have most often been attributed to individual-levelfactors such as diet or stressful experiences. This project will usecontemporary culture theory and methods to examine how cultural modelsconstruct shared meanings, which in turn affect the behavior of individualsand their health status. The research hypothesizes that high culturalconsonance, the degree to which individuals approximate shared culturalmodels, will be associated with better physiological and psychologicaladaptation, as measured by lower blood pressure and other variablesassociated with stress and distress. The research will be done in RibeiraoPreto, Brazil, a community with a considerable amount of socio-cultural anddietary variability. The research will take place in four diverseneighborhoods in three stages: unstructured interviewing will be used toelicit cultural domains; then cultural consensus analysis will be used totest for shared knowledge; and finally data on individual psycho-biologicaladaptation will be collected from a survey sample. The research willcontribute to our understanding of how individuals adapt in their culturalsetting as well as advance our knowledge of this important region of theworld.