What's Cultural about Biocultural Research?

Advances in biocultural research have been hampered by the lack of an explicit theory of culture. Culture can be viewed as a collection of cultural models of specific domains with empirically verifiable distributions within a social group. Individuals are variably able to approximate these models in their own beliefs and behavior, a concept referred to as “cultural consonance.” Cultural consonance is hypothesized to be associated with psychophysiologic outcomes, including blood pressure and depressive symptoms. In this article, the cultural domain of family life in Brazil is used to illustrate both the concept and measurement of cultural consonance. It is associated with arterial blood pressure and depressive symptoms, controlling for covariates and other explanatory variables. This theoretical orientation can define more precisely the cultural in the biocultural.