Bill Dressler (PhD Connecticut, 1978) is a medical anthropologist with interests in culture theory, community studies, research methods, and especially the relationship between culture and disease risk. In his earlier work Dressler adapted models of psychosocial stress to examine the association between social and cultural factors and the risk of chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease and dysthymic disorder. His recent work emphasizes concepts and methods for examining the health effects of individual efforts to achieve culturally-defined goals and aspirations. He has developed a new concept, 'cultural consonance,' to define this link of culture and the individual theoretically and operationally. This work has necessitated the theoretical integration of cultural constructivist and social structural theoretical orientations, and the development of research methods for linking the cultural, the individual, and the biological. Dressler and colleagues have examined these factors in settings as diverse as urban Great Britain, the Southeast U.S., the West Indies, Mexico, and Samoa.
Current Research – In 2011 Dressler and his Brazilian colleagues received funding from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1026429) for a new project entitled ‘Cultural and Genetic Influences on Individual Well-Being in Urban Brazil.’ The aim of this 3-year project is to follow up directly on one of the more interesting findings to emerge from their previous studies. Dressler and colleagues obtained genetic data on a subsample of their respondents and identified an interaction between cultural consonance and a polymorphism in the 2A receptor for serotonin, a neurotransmitter. Very roughly, one variant of this polymorphism appears to act as an ‘amplifier’ of experience, leading persons with low cultural consonance to report more depressive symptoms than persons with other genotypes, and leading persons with high cultural consonance to report fewer depressive symptoms than persons with other genotypes. The current research will follow up on these provocative findings by examining this gene-culture synergism in a larger sample and in relation to two polymorphisms in the serotonergic system.
Links to the NSF proposal and to a conference paper version of the study on which it is based are given below (the published version appeared in the American Journal of Human Biology in 2009).
The current research builds on two previous projects funded by NSF, one carried out in 1991 (BNS-9020786: ‘Social Environment and Physiologic Adjustment in a Developing Society’) and the other carried out in 2001 (BCS-0091903: ‘Culture and Individual Adaptation’). The current study will provide a third wave of cross-sectional data describing health, culture, and society in urban Brazil. A link is provided to a listing of publications and conference papers associated with each project.
Professional Activities and Awards - Dressler has served as Associate Editor of Human Organization (1986-1988), and as a member of the editorial boards of Ethnicity and Disease (1991-1996), Santé, Culture, Health (1988-1996), and the American Anthropologist (2006-2008). He currently serves on the editorial boards of: Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; and, Paidéia: Estudos em Psicologia e Educação.
He served as a member of the Executive Board of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) from 1988-1991, and from 1998-2002 he was President of the SMA. Dressler won the Stirling Award of the Society for Psychological Anthropology in 1979. He was named a University Research Fellow of The University of Alabama (1984-1986). In 2000 Prof. Dressler was the John P. Kirscht Distinguished Lecturer, School of Public Health, University of Michigan and in 2002 was Distinguished Lecturer, Graduate Student Invitational Lecture at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Also in 2002 he received the University of Alabama's Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2005 he was named a College of Arts & Sciences Leadership Board Faculty Fellow. He served as the Grand Marshal for The University of Alabama commencement ceremonies, May 3-4, 2013.
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| 2012 |
| Dressler, William W. Cultural consonance: Linking culture, the individual, and health. Preventive Medicine 55: 390-393. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2012 |
| Dressler, William W., Kathryn S. Oths, Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro, and José Ernesto dos Santos. How culture shapes the body: Cultural consonance and body mass in urban Brazil. American Journal of Human Biology 24: 325-331. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2012 |
| Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, and José Ernesto dos Santos. Cultural consonance, consciousness, and depression: Genetic moderating effects on the psychological mediators of culture, in The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology Daniel H. Lende and Greg Downey, Eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2011 |
| Balieiro, Mauro C., Manoel A. dos Santos, José Ernesto dos Santos, and William W. Dressler. Does perceived stress mediate the effect of cultural consonance on depression? Transcultural Psychiatry 48: 519-538. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2011 |
| Dressler, William W. Culture and the stress process,pp. 119-134 in A Companion to Medical Anthropology. Merrill Singer and Pamela Erickson, Eds. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2010 |
| Dressler, William W. Medical anthropology, pp. 277-289 in Handbook of Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine. Jerry Suls, Katrina Davidson and Robert Kaplan, Eds. New York: Guilford Press. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2010 |
| Dressler, William W. Social inequality and health: A commentary. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24: 549-554. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2009 |
| Dressler, William W. Explaining health inequalities, pp. 175-184 in Health, Risk and Adversity. Catherine Panter-Brick and Agustín Fuentes, Editors. New York: Bergahn Books. |
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| 2009 |
| Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro, and Jose Ernesto dos Santos. Cultural consonance, a 5HT2A receptor polymorphism, and depressive symptoms: A longitudinal study of gene x culture interaction in urban Brazil. American Journal of Human Biology 21: 91-97. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2009 |
| Newkirk, Christine N, Kathryn S. Oths, William W. Dressler, and José Ernesto dos Santos. Intracultural diversity in food knowledge in southern Brazil. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 48: 285-302. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2008 |
| Dressler, William W. and Kathryn S. Oths. Reflections on teaching SCRM: Survey research methods in anthropology. Practicing Anthropology 30: 40-41. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2008 |
| Dressler, William W. Kathryn S. Oths, Rosane P. Ribeiro, Mauro C. Balieiro and Jose Ernesto dos Santos. Cultural consonance and adult body composition in urban Brazil. American Journal of Human Biology 20: 15-22. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2007 |
| Dressler, William W. Cultural consonance, pp. 179-190 in Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry. Dinesh Bhugra and Kameldeep Bhui, Editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2007 |
| Dressler, William W. Meaning and structure in research in medical anthropology. Anthropology in Action 14: 30-43. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2007 |
| Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro and Jose Ernesto dos Santos. A prospective study of cultural consonance and depressive symptoms in urban Brazil. Social Science and Medicine 65: 2058-2069. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2007 |
| Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro, and José Ernesto Dos Santos. Cultural consonance and psychological distress: Examining the associations in multiple cultural domains. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 31: 195-224. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2006 |
| Dressler, William W. Cultural dimensions of the stress process: Measurement issues in fieldwork, pp. 27-59 in Measuring Stress in Humans. Gillian Ice and Gary D. James, Editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2005 |
| Dressler, William W. What's cultural about biocultural research? Ethos 33: 20-45. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2005 |
| Dressler, William W., Camila D. Borges, Mauro C. Balieiro, and José Ernesto Dos Santos. Measuring cultural consonance: Examples with special reference to measurement theory in anthropology. Field Methods 17: 331-355 Pdf available by e-mail. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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| 2005 |
| Dressler, William W., Mauro C. Balieiro, Rosane P. Ribeiro, and José Ernesto Dos Santos. Cultural consonance and arterial blood pressure in urban Brazil. Social Science and Medicine 61: 527-540. Pdf available by e-mail. |
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