Environmental, Biological, and Cultural Influences on Health and Behavior

Models of the social determinants of health have proliferated in recent years across multiple disciplines. Yet, this surge in the literature within a small timeframe has led to ambiguities in the way of discerning which social determinants should be the focus of clinical applications. These and other important issues remain unresolved. For instance, how are cultural norms and biological mechanisms incorporated into these models? To address these questions, my work integrates cultural and evolutionary perspectives to understand the root causes of health disparities. The overarching research program asks: how do mortality risks (e.g., environmental stressors) affect developmental trajectories and human reproductive health? How do cultural practices shape health norms? First, I examined biological weathering resulting from environmental stressors and their association with psychological and behavioral outcomes from a life history (LH) perspective. I recruited a cohort of university students to test an integrative model in which childhood environmental stress (i.e., neighborhood crime, familial discord, and socioeconomic status) are hypothesized to influence psychometrically-assessed LH indicators (i.e., mental health and social behaviors) mediated through biometrically-assessed LH indicators (i.e., developmental timing, biological weathering). My findings suggest that biological weathering is exacerbated by early life stress and that rates of telomere attrition contributed to individual differences, including sex differences, in human LH strategies. To further interrogate the role early life environmental stress has in contributing to health disparities, I investigated how the socio-political environment becomes embodied among pregnant and recently pregnant Filipina women using qualitative interviews. The results suggest that there are culturally shaped attitudes that downplay stress in addition to various coping strategies. One likely consequence manifesting from the perceived socio-political environment (Chapter 2) is psychosocial stress and related mental health outcomes. Thus, I sought to examine Filipino American conceptualizations of mental health as a first step toward understanding factors shaping cultural beliefs and attitudes toward stress, depression, and anxiety as well as cultural explanations of mental health in Filipino American mothers with different immigration statuses (Chapter 3). My results highlight stark generational differences regarding mental health definitions, stigma, and shame, which may explain why mental health disparities in Filipino Americans continue to exist. Taken together, my findings have important implications for women’s physical and mental health as well as for understanding biological embodiment reflecting environmental stressors