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Joystick apparatus. Each rater watches the mother-child interaction on the computer screen and simultaneously uses a joystick apparatus to assess the moment-to-moment behaviour of one of the interactants using the Cartesian plane (displayed in bottom right corner of the rater's computer screen). 

Joystick apparatus. Each rater watches the mother-child interaction on the computer screen and simultaneously uses a joystick apparatus to assess the moment-to-moment behaviour of one of the interactants using the Cartesian plane (displayed in bottom right corner of the rater's computer screen). 

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The relations between maternal and child ADHD symptoms and interpersonal behaviour were examined. Mother-child dyads (N = 59), with children 8-to 12-years-old, exhibiting a range of ADHD symptoms, participated in a problem-solving task. Participants' interpersonal behaviours (along continuums of affiliation: friendliness-hostility and control: domi...

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... program, run on a Windows XP interface and a Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 joystick, was used to code dyad members' behaviours. Three independent raters (who were blind to ADHD symptomatology and diagnostic status), watched each interaction on a computer screen and simultaneously used the joystick technique to code the behaviour of each participant as it was unfolding in real-time (See Figure 1 for joystick apparatus). The Joymon.exe program displays a window of the two-dimensional space with friendliness- hostility on the horizontal dimension, and dominance-submissiveness on the vertical dimension. ...

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... The CAID system assesses interpersonal dynamics as they unfold in real time and models interpersonal processes at the individual and dyadic level, capturing contextual nuance and the reciprocal nature of these dynamics. The CAID has shown promise in understanding parent-child interactions, demonstrating that they can be reliably coded and linked to indicators of adjustment [12,14,15]. For example, our prior work with this sample examined whether interpersonal dynamics between parents and adolescents varied as a function of discussing various topics related to alcohol and cannabis use, and whether CAID parameters were associated with a variety of parenting and substance use outcomes [12]. ...
... Further, deviations from complementarity have been hypothesized to be associated with psychopathology [31] and important therapeutic processes [32,33]. For instance, Nilsen et al. [15] tested whether warmth and dominance complementarity varied between children and their mothers as a function of child Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms. They found lower warmth complementarity when children exhibited high ADHD symptoms, suggesting that parent-child dyads with a lower tendency to reciprocate warmth also had a higher likelihood of severe child ADHD symptoms. ...
... The CAID is an observational coding method where raters use a computer joystick to continuously assess changes in warmth and dominance during an interaction [13]. The CAID has successfully been applied to studies of married couples and romantic partners [10,11,16], patients and therapists [32,34], unacquainted undergraduates [13,35], and parents and their children [11,12,14,15]. These studies have yielded novel insights into interpersonal dynamics that would be missed with typical, aggregate assessments of interpersonal behavior. ...
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The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is an observational tool that measures warmth and dominance dynamics in real time and is sensitive to individual, dyadic, and contextual influences. Parent-adolescent interpersonal dynamics, which conceptually map onto parenting styles, are an integral part of positive adolescent adjustment and protect against risky outcomes. The current study’s goal was to test the degree to which sources of influence on CAID data observed in a previous study of married couples generalize to a sample of parent-adolescent dyads. We examined data from ten raters who rated moment-to-moment warmth and dominance using CAID in a sample of 61 parent-adolescent dyads (N = 122) who were largely non-Hispanic White (62%) or African American (30%) based on parent report (adolescent M age = 14; 57% female). Dyads interacted in four different discussion segments (situations). We applied Generalizability Theory to delineate several sources of variance in CAID parameters and estimated within and between-person reliability. Results revealed a number of different influences, including the person, kinsperson (adolescent versus parent), dyad, rater, situation, and interactions among these factors, on ratings of parent-adolescent interpersonal behavior. These results largely replicate results from married couples, suggesting that the factors that influence ratings of interpersonal interactions largely generalize across sample types.
... Using CAID, researchers have found that most interactions are warm and dominant . Unfamiliar dyads (i.e., strangers) and collaborative tasks were associated with more complementarity on communion while familiar dyads (e.g., friends, roommates, couples) and conflict tasks were associated with more complementarity on (Lizdek et al., 2016), personality pathology (Assaad et al., 2020), and ADHD symptoms (Nilsen et al., 2015) have all been shown to impact interpersonal dynamics during dyadic interactions. Overall, CAID is sensitive to aspects of the relationship between individuals, the demands of the task, and individual differences in psychopathology that can impact interpersonal dynamics. ...
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The current study aimed to examine the relationship between personality traits and interpersonal states. Eighty undergraduate participants were administered personality trait inventories, then 40 dyads were video recorded doing collaborative tasks. These video recordings were coded for moment-to-moment communion and agency using Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics. Actor-Partner Interdependence Modeling was used to understand the impact of personality traits on interpersonal dynamics (average, variability, slope, complementarity on agency and communion). The results showed that there were no relationships between personality traits and dynamics. There were two main limitations that may explain these results. First, behavior may have been influenced more by social norms to be friendly and take turns than personality traits, especially in this “strong situation”. Second, it may be useful to aggregate behavior over multiple situations to capture variance attributable to traits. Future studies should aggregate behavior over multiple situations and/or change the situational constraints on behavior in order to determine the relationship between states and traits.
... To expand on the brief review of dispositional interpersonal findings above, results using these "dynamic" approaches to examine interpersonal functioning find that individuals vary considerably in their interpersonal behavior within and across situations in predictable ways. For instance, the fine-grained second-by-second coding method of Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (Girard & C Wright, 2018;Lizdek et al., 2012), has revealed that conflict tasks are characterized by more cold behavior than nonconflict tasks and more negative affect in response to coldness , mother-child interaction patterns were associated with less affiliative behavior as a function of ADHD diagnosis (Nilsen et al., 2015), maternal control is influenced by evocative gene-environment correlations (Klahr et al., 2013), and that wives' depressive symptoms influenced dynamics of dominance (wife increased while husband decreased over the interaction) but husbands' depressive symptoms influenced dynamics of affiliation (affiliation in husband and wife decreased over the interaction; Lizdek et al., 2016). Looking across situations in daily life using ecological momentary assessment, detailed articulations of contextualized dynamic processes associated with psychopathology have been empirically modeled, such as the perceptions of withdrawal!negative affect!hostility characteristic of borderline pathology (Sadikaj et al., 2013), or perceptions of dominance!negative ...
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Theoretical accounts of psychopathology often emphasize social context as etiologically centralto psychological dysfunction, and interpersonal impairments are widely implicated for many legacy diagnostic categories that span domains of psychopathology (e.g., affective, personality, thought disorders). Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory (CIIT) seeks to explain the emergence, expression, and maintenance of socio-affective functioning and dysfunction across levels and timescales of analysis. We emphasize the importance of cohesively addressing the often-segregated challenges of establishing empirically supported structure, functional accounts of dynamic processes, and how together these facilitate theoretical and methodological consistency across levels of analysis ranging from biology to behavior. We illustrate CIIT’s potential to serve as an integrative theory for generating falsifiable hypotheses that support strong inference investigations into the nature of psychological dysfunction across a range of traditional diagnostic constructs and superordinate spectra of psychopathology.
Article
Interpersonal theory suggests interpersonal functioning is healthier when exchanging dominance throughout a conversation (agentic complementarity). However, many research paradigms measure agency across conversations rather than within conversations. This leads to different timescales (seconds vs. minutes) and analyses (between-situation vs. within-situation), complicating how interpersonal complementarity is researched and applied clinically. Interpersonal processes (complementarity, covariation) are examined across different timescales, and a new way to measure within-situation complementarity using EMA data is proposed. Participants across two datasets (n=186, n=180) completed 20 social interaction records. New measures of within-situation interpersonal processes were more often and stronger related to measures of psychopathology at baseline and in daily life. We discuss the implications for theory and assessment of interpersonal processes moving forward.
Article
Assessing parent-child interactions is critical for understanding family dynamics, however tools available for capturing these dynamics are limited. The current study sought to examine the validity of the Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) for understanding the dynamics of parent-adolescent substance use discussions. Specifically, we examined how CAID parameters were related to indicators of parenting and substance use. Sixty-one parent-adolescent dyads (M adolescent age = 14.02, 57% female; M parent age = 46.40; 98% female) completed three 9-minute video-taped conflict, alcohol, and cannabis discussions as well as self-report measures of parenting (e.g., monitoring, psychological control) and substance use behaviors (e.g., intentions, use with parental permission). Interactions were coded using the CAID which provides continuous assessments of parent and adolescent warmth and dominance. Parental warmth, adolescent warmth, and dominance complementarity CAID parameters were positively associated with adaptive parenting and negatively associated with maladaptive parenting factors. Parental warmth in the cannabis discussion was negatively associated with the substance use and intentions factor. These findings support CAID as a reliable and valid assessment of interpersonal dynamics that characterize parent-adolescent substance use discussions and suggest that substance use conversations may be most effective when parents and adolescents act warmly throughout the discussion and exhibit dominance complementarity.
Chapter
and Keywords This chapter reviews structural and process assumptions of the Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory of personality and presents the interpersonal situation as a synthetic and widely applicable framework for integrating the structure and dynamics of persons and situations. It is an interactional-dynamic perspective that is variable-centered and dimensional (agency and communion; valence and arousal), specifies the important characteristics of situations, synthesizes objective and subjective perspectives, and is applicable to multimethod, multi-informant, multi-timescale assessments in situ, juxta situm, or ex situ organized by the interpersonal circumplex. Emphasizing clinical implications, the chapter reviews multimethod, multi-timescale empirical research employing intensive repeated measures designs (event-contingent recording, continuous assessment of interpersonal dynamics) supporting the interpersonal situation and its relevance for studying personality, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. It then elaborates on the utility of the interpersonal situation framework for psychotherapy practice and training. Finally, it identifies future directions for advancing this contemporary interpersonal perspective on psychological situations.
Article
This paper links Criterion A of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5th Edition Alternative Model for Personality Disorders with the contemporary interpersonal model of personality pathology. Advances in interpersonal theory and assessment are outlined to demonstrate that Criterion A's self (identity, self-direction) and interpersonal (empathy, intimacy) impairments are related to the interpersonal meta-constructs and agency and communion and are operationalized by perceptual, behavioral, and affective mechanisms of the interpersonal situation framework. Research informed by the interpersonal situation examining interpersonal functioning in personality disorders is reviewed. Specifically, studies employing experience sampling with event-contingent designs examine social functioning in daily life and studies employing continuous assessment of interpersonal dynamics examine the moment-to-moment unfolding of interpersonal behavior in dyadic interactions.