The gap between what a culture holds to be a good life and what an individual has achieved predicts that individual's stress and health, independently of income.
Dressler's approach measures the shared cultural model first, by finding what people in a community actually agree constitutes a proper household or a successful life, and then measures each individual's distance from it. Low consonance has been associated with higher blood pressure and depressive symptoms in Brazilian and other samples, with income controlled.
In practice
- Two households on identical incomes differ in health, and the difference tracks how far each falls short of what their neighbours count as doing well.
- A professional who meets every external marker of success in a field whose own standards she misses is measurably worse off than her salary predicts.