The Cultural Consonance Space: Multiplicities and Enactments of Male Body Ideals in South Korea - Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Cultural consonance, defined as the extent to which one is able to approximate a given cultural model in one’s own life, is a highly adaptive theory and method which anthropologists have used for deca...

New publication! The cultural consonance-health relationship goes beyond having cultural consonance to how cultural consonance is actually enacted. Here, the specific body ideal enacted shaped eating disorder risk among young Korean men.

#bodyimage #anthrosky

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

And I look forward to advancing #bodyimage and #eatingdisorders research through rigorous and emically valid approaches to culture, so we can do a better job of addressing this increasingly global issue.

I’ve found that cognitive anthropological methods like cultural domain analysis and cultural consonance analysis are extremely effective for characterizing local needs systematically.

I’m most interested in maximizing “emic validity” - how well a measure assesses an issue in a community’s own terms

And (3) always starting from peoples’ own understandings of the world, their experiences, and their expectations.

My work tries to address this with
(1) greater attention to intercultural differences in eating disorders
(2) recognition intracultural differences (not treating culture as monolithic), and relating these differences to other social, political and economic factors…

The point of all this is, culture matters immensely and has gone under-appreciated in body image and eating disorders.

They find that Interpersonal Psychotherapy tends to be more effective, because their distress often lies not in conflicts within the bounded individual or individual toleration of outside stressors, but in relationships within the extended self.

This may be because of different conceptions of The Self (e.g. bounded [like in the US, *me* stops at the skin] vs extended [in many cultures, *me* includes my family, friends, nation, natural environment, built environment etc.]). Damage to these = damage to me.

The same goes for treatment. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of the most common treatments for eating disorders. But some Asia-based practitioners report that it doesn’t work for their patients.

Ironically, the DSM-5 describes these as “atypical” presentations, even though recent evidence suggests they’re far and away the most common, especially outside of Western white female populations.

Diagnosis is biased too. Around the world and throughout history, people have exhibited all of the other symptoms of anorexia and bulimia as currently understood, without also exhibiting the extreme drive for thinness. The same goes for any other symptom.

*I say validated loosely, as the Korean validation study found a totally different factor structure from the US sample, but it gets used anyways.

But they contain inherent biases that may hamper their meaningfulness, usefulness, and interpretability across cultures.

Ex: a popular US-originating measure, validated* in Korea, has an item “음식을 작은 조각으로 나누어 먹는다“ (I divide my food into small pieces and eat it).

Korean meals are served pre-cut.

Usually, cross-cultural mental health research transplants measures developed using a combination of (English-biased) literature reviews, (Western-trained) expert consensus, and testing in primarily White college student samples to other locations and assumes they function similarly.

Eating disorders are rising in men and in all genders across the world. So, they’re not just “white women” illnesses.

Other groups appear to have lower rates of eating disorders, but this may be because they experience eating disorders differently. Current practices don’t/can’t account for this.

However, research agendas, measures, diagnostic criteria, and treatment options for eating disorders were all developed with primarily white, Western samples.

Most were developed for women in particular, and don’t account for men’s experiences adequately to begin with.

South Korea is interesting from a body image perspective because Korean men and women have some of the highest body dissatisfaction in the world.

Koreans’ male body ideals tended to be slimmer than in the West, and masculinity ideals favored more ornamental than instrumental body practices.

Only about 1% of published eating disorders research meaningfully addresses men’s experiences, and only 2.5% meaningfully addresses nonwhite peoples’ experiences.

Culture is almost universally neglected, even though it impacts gender expression and experience, body ideals, and illness experiences

I just got a lot of followers from Korea-related starter packs, so I should probably clarify who I am.

I’m a biocultural medical anthropologist who studies cultural and gender variations in body image and eating disorders. My research has focused on young men in South Korea. 🧵 #anthrosky #bodyimage

A cultural models approach to understanding body fatness perceptions and disordered eating in young South Korean men Objective The eating disorders field has been limited by a predominant focus on White, Western women, and there is growing recognition of the need to understand cross-cultural variation in key const...

While #BMI is associated with disordered eating, it cannot account for cross-cultural differences in the meanings of body sizes. A cultural models approach leads to more emically valid interpretations of cultural variations in ED risk #bodyimage #anthropology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

“Guys with Big Muscles Have Misplaced Priorities”: Masculinities and Muscularities in Young South Korean Men’s Body Image - Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Men’s body image is an issue of increasing importance as related illnesses continue to grow in prevalence around the world. However, cross-cultural attention to men’s body image experiences has been r...

South Korean young adults described negative attitudes toward male bodies with large muscles, instead preferring "small muscles" (잔근육). Masculinity and muscularity are not universally coupled #anthropology #bodyimage link.springer.com/10.1007/s110...

Cultural consonance (an individual's ability to enact cultural models in their own lives) interacts with university prestige and sexual identity to predict disordered eating in diverse ways among young South Korean men #anthropology #bodyimage doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

Culture beyond categories: Examining intercultural variation in South Koreans' and Americans' attention to men's bodily features Cross-cultural research into body image often takes for granted the cultural differences in body ideals that may account for variations in body image experience. Male body image across cultures is al...

Americans and South Koreans prioritize different male body traits. US men value functionality, while Koreans focus on proportions and appearance. Cultural models reveal body image ideals rooted in distinct histories and social norms. #BodyImage #Anthropology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Cultural models of male body image, fat, and acceptable personhood among Euro-Americans and South Koreans - Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science Based on a comparative study of Euro-American and South Korean college students’ cultural models of the ideal male body, I show that Euro-Americans and Koreans conceptualize fat in distinct ways relat...

South Koreans and white Americans endorsed negative attitudes toward fat in men's bodies. However, Americans thought with #healthism and linked fat with moral failure, while Koreans thought with #lookism and linked fat with "self-maintenance (자기 관리)" and SES link.springer.com/10.1007/s418...

Flower boys and muscled men: comparing South Korean and American male body ideals using cultural domain analysis Body image disturbance and eating disorders are rising all over the world. However, little is known about experiences of body image in men across cultural groups, and measurement tools often fail t...

We used cultural domain analysis and residual agreement analysis to compare cultural models of male body ideals among South Koreans and white Americans. We discuss similarities and differences in male body ideals, their cultural underpinnings, and implications. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....