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Biopsychosocial Responses to Stress Since the early 1980s, biocultural anthropologists have focused on psychosocial stress as a pathway to link lived experiences to biology (Goodman et al. 1988). The stress perspective can be traced to the pioneering work of Hans Selye (1956) on the activation of adrenal cortical and medullary stress hormone pathway. Stressors can include an excess or dearth of stimuli, and range from noise, to hunger, to traumatic events, to frustrations and concerns over a host of lived experiences. Also, perception of stress is critical to physiological response. As well, the physiological pathways between stressful stimuli and biological responses are linked to a wide variety of health conditions, and studying these pathways can contribute to broad preventative efforts. Thus, the stress perspective links culture, psychology, and political economy to a broad range of health conditions through specific physiological pathways and biological processes.

Biocultural anthropologists are now developing new methods for measuring stress responses in the field. Research has included a focus on stressful life events, social supports, and cultural consonance (Dressler and Bindon 2000), status inconsistency (McDade 2002), debt (Sweet et al. 2018), transitioning (Dubois et al. 2017), war-related trauma (Kort et al. 2016; Panter-Brick et al. 2008), and food (Hadley et al. 2008) and water (Brewis et al. 2020). Psychosocial stressors are then related to a series of biological outcomes such as child growth, blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and more recently directly to stress hormones (e.g., salivary steroids) and immune function (e.g., EBV antibody level).