by Vanessa MarshallPerhaps the best way to start with this chapter is recognizing the problems with defining and studying culture. The authors outline five reasons: culture is based on a weak social nature of “facts”, culture is often confused with established social-psychological ideas, intracultural diversity is not taken into account (homogenization), culture is defined at population level and not with respect to individuals, and methods for measuring culture at the population level have not been/ cannot be applied to individual level.
The authors also provide a definition of culture via the Cognitive Theory of Culture as culture is defined as what an individual needs to know in order to function adequately in a particular society. From this definition, the idea of cultural consonance is developed where culture emphasizes the sharing of meaning and knowledge within social groups. Cultural consonance then is a twofold issue. First, it is when individuals incorporate populationally shared meanings into their lives that influence their beliefs and behaviors, and secondly, it is the degree to which these individuals recognize and use these population level cultural meanings. Though the idea of cultural consonance can be tricky to comprehend, the authors put it into perspective by connecting it to the other issues discussed in the chapter. Lower cultural consonance is associated with greater depression because living at the edge of social and cultural norms for a society is an inherently stressful experience. With these ideas in mind, the chapter moves on to discussing how depression is a result of cultural beliefs and behaviors intersecting with the genetic information that structures the neural net’s functioning. Additionally, cultural consonance and depression are affected by the gene variant encoding serotonin receptors. A preliminary study showed the AA variant of the serotonin receptor gene had more drastic changes in serotonin and thus depression levels depending on how an individual’s cultural consonance changed over a two-year period. The question is how exactly genetics and cultural consonance interact. The direction the research is going is to combine a model of how genes moderate the effects of cultural consonance with a model of how psychological factors mediate the effects of cultural consonance. The important distinction here is that a moderator changes the relationship between variables, whereas a mediator stands between a predictor and an outcome. Mediation hypothesis research looks at the causal relationship between cultural consonance, dysfunctional beliefs, and depression. The research presented is fascinating, but there are so many aspects, each with their own caveats that I am not sure I fully understand how the data collected could be analyzed in a way that could translate to treating depression. Additionally, consciousness is tied in during the discussion, but the differentiation between reflexive vs non-reflexive consciousness wasn’t entirely clear to me. I’m hoping that class discussion will highlight the connections that I am missing.
5 Comments
Elisabeth Nations
4/9/2019 08:33:27 pm
Vanessa, I agree with you in that I wasn't able to see how this research could be applied in a practical way, especially to the treatment of depression. Although defining the link between cultural consonance and depression and how it affects people differently based on genetics is interesting, it seems somewhat useless when the impact of cultural consonance on mental state was already well-known. I haven't previously read research on this topic as far as I can remember, but it seems to be commonly understood in our society that people who may not "fit in" with or are unable to accomplish commonly-held cultural beliefs often struggle with their mental health and with feeling content about their lives. I wasn't sure what to do with this article; what was really the point of this research and how could it be used in the future?
Reply
Brian Rivera
4/10/2019 07:24:45 am
I thought many aspects of the chapter were impressive in the amount of science they covered (e.g genetics, neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.), however, because of this, I also felt that a chapter didn't and couldn't have been able to compress all of the information needed to understand the link between genetics and depression. I learned much about depression, but the complexity of this issues at so many levels of analysis left me feeling skeptic about the how the model's relevant variables are selected. Last week we talked about the role of the microbiome in depression which only featured minimally in this chapter's model through a reference to food. Even though the model might be useful and insightful, I think that it is difficult to specify how such a model informs neuroanthropology.
Reply
Daniel J Quillen
4/10/2019 09:45:32 am
What I struggled with in this chapter is how the author was able to connect social disfunction genes and depression in this fashion. We can't know if the reason that a person has poor cultural consonance is because they are depressed and the reason they are depressed is a gene causing serotin malfunction. The gene may have nothing to do with cultural consonance itself only the depression the gene can cause has the affect. Much more research needs to go into studying how genes specifically are linked to depression cultural consonance and how they all affect each other.
Reply
Moe Prince
4/10/2019 09:59:25 am
I wholeheartedly agree that the data was presented in a fascinating way and was difficult to gain a clear understanding on how this information would be used practically. However, I always thoroughly enjoy learning more about being different from a societies standard and how that affects ones mental health. This is incredibly interesting to me as I often wonder if there are ways to improve that feeling of being an outcast through finding other community members who feel similarly and becoming a group themselves.
Reply
8/31/2021 05:20:33 am
i found this article so much it has a lot of info it's the first time to know it, thanks for sharing
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThis blog is group authored by Dr. DeCaro and the students in his ANT 474/574: Neuroanthropology. Archives
April 2019
Categories |