Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory-Integrating Structure, Dynamics, Temporal Scale, and

Abstract

Theoretical accounts of psychopathology often emphasize social context as etiologically central to 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. I 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. I 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.

Presenting Author

Aaron Pincus | The Pennsylvania State University