STRESS, SOCIAL INEQUALITY, AND CULTURE CHANGE: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO HUMAN PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY (HYPERTENSION, SOCIALITY)

Social psychophysiology is concerned with the interrelationship between emotion, physiology, and the sociocultural environment. Evolutionary, developmental, physiological, medical, psychological, cross-cultural, and political economic aspects of human social psychophysiology are examined in this thesis. This combination, from a holistic anthropological approach, addresses the questions of why and how stress has grown to its current proportions in Western society. The psychophysiological system is not principally an adaptation for agonism ( fight or flight ); it is the biological foundation of an affective system, integral to the maintenance of human sociality. It is, therefore, not primarily suppressed aggressiveness which produces high levels of unrelieved stress in Western industrial society. Some aspects of industrial social organization contradict the basic conditions for human sociality and cause widespread social insecurity, anxiety, and physiological heterostasis. Different cultures define the characteristics of social value, upon which social acceptance, affiliation, and security are based, differently. Within stratified societies, status and security are linked. In Western industrial societies, class and ethnic status has an inverse relationship to the prevalance and magnitude of stressors, rates of anxiety, feelings of helplessness/hopelessness and inadequacy associated with depression, rates of most psychiatric illinesses, adrenal hormone levels, and rates of cardiovascular and other diseases related to stress. Non-western populations, recently integrated within an urban, capitalistic political economy at the least secure socioeconomic strata, also exhibit high levels of psychophysiological arousal. While other researchers have emphasized the stressfulness of acculturative change in itself, this dissertation focuses on the specifications of the economic and sociocultural context into which modernizing groups become integrated. A field study is reported, on stress in the lives of the Black British immigrants, who, like many Afro-Americans and working class whites, are systematically frustrated in their efforts to achieve material security and a satisfactory sense of social worth. The stress-effects of racism and class are discussed