ABSTRACT
As the intersections between diverse world cultures increase, the need for an appreciation of cultural influences on health behavior becomes more critical to our understanding of self-regulation processes. By failing to adequately acknowledge culture, health care practitioners as well as researchers decon- textualize social problems and objectify them as individual problems. This approach to health and illness predominates in the Western world, despite evidence that most factors which affect health are outside the traditional sphere of medical care and reside in the lifestyles of persons within a community (Mechanic, 1995; McGinnis and Foege, 1993). This chapter provides a conceptual overview of self-regulation processes within a cultural context and explores how the interpretations of somatic experiences used to guide behavior vary among cultures.
