Culture and Individual Adaptation

本项目通过调查文化、社会心理和饮食对个体在生理和心理适应方面的差异的影响来研究文化对个体适应的影响。血压、血脂、焦虑和抑郁等变量的个体差异最常归因于个人层面的因素，如饮食或压力经历。这个项目将使用当代文化理论和方法来研究文化模式如何构建共享意义，进而影响个人的行为和健康状况。这项研究假设，高文化和谐性，即个体在多大程度上接近共享的文化模式，将与更好的生理和心理适应有关，通过较低的血压和其他与压力和痛苦相关的变量来衡量。这项研究将在巴西的Ribeirao Preto进行，这是一个具有相当大的社会文化和饮食多样性的社区。研究将在四个不同的社区进行，分三个阶段进行：非结构化访谈将被用来获取文化领域；文化共识分析将被用来测试共享知识；最后，关于个体心理-生物适应的数据将从调查样本中收集。这项研究将有助于我们理解个人如何适应他们的文化背景，并增进我们对世界上这个重要地区的了解。

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.