The interpersonal nexus of persons, situations, and psychopathology.

Advances in personality consistency and person–situation inte-gration hold immense promise to forge a more uniﬁed psycholog-ical science, including greater synthesis of personality, social, andclinical psychology. The two goals of this essay are to highlight that(a) this emerging integration is capable of providing new ap-proaches to describing and understanding psychopathology thatare consistent with the common observation of ﬂuctuating symp-tomology, and (b) the interpersonal theory of personality and itsassociated circumplex models of behavior, traits, and motives pro-vides a nexus for coherently organizing such investigations of clin-ical phenomena.Some diagnoses, such as trichotillomania, imply rather classicconceptions of cross-situational consistency—chronic hair pullingwithout signiﬁcant situational contingencies. The prominent fea-tures of others, such as bipolar disorder, are best characterizedby variability in mood and behavior over time. Finally, manydiagnostic features are actually based on implicit or explicit if-then behavioral signatures. For example, a cardinal symptom ofborderline personality disorder could be phrased as, ‘‘if the per-son perceives abandonment, then frantic efforts to avoid it areenacted.” Deﬁning symptoms of social phobia could be phrasedas, ‘‘if the person perceives scrutiny, dislike, or disapproval fromothers, then anxiety is experienced and avoidance behaviors areenacted.”A key implication of situation–behavior contingencies is theneed to identify the psychologically salient features of situations,and this requires an organizing psychological theory. Consistentwith our analysis of many if-then diagnostic features of psycho-pathology, recent work in personality, social, and clinical psy-chology converges in emphasizing the salience of interpersonalfeatures of situations (Fournier, Moskowitz, & Zuroff, 2008; Pin-cus, Lukowitsky, & Wright, in press; Reis, 2008). We suggest thatthe interpersonal theory of personality and its circumplex mod-els based on agentic and communal constructs is a promisingframework for person–situation integration for a number of rea-sons. First, it provides a system to describe interpersonal behav-iors (i.e., ACME States; Fleeson & Noftle, 2008) and interpersonalsituations using a common metric. Second, empirical researchconﬁrms the normative behavioral contingencies of interpersonalsituations described by the principles of interpersonal comple-mentarity, supporting the proposition that chronic deviationsfrom complementarity may indicate the presence of psychopa-thology. And third, by proposing that a focal question for thestudy of psychopathology is ‘‘Why do individuals stray fromthe conventions of dyadic interaction?”, the framework pointsto multiple possible sources of disturbed interpersonalfunctioning (e.g., distortions in interpersonal perception andmeaning making processes; maladaptive, underdeveloped, orovervalued interpersonal goals, motives, expectancies, beliefs,and competencies).Pathological behavioral signatures often reﬂect coping behav-iors (thens) activated by distorted perceptions of interpersonal sit-uations (ifs). Problems arise because behaviors are enacted basedon characteristic misinterpretations of the agentic and communalaspects of situations that are inconsistent with others’ perceptionsand intentions. The paranoid person misinterprets a broad array ofinterpersonal situations as malevolent (if), responding with self-protective hostile-dominance (then). In new interpersonal situa-tions this violates normative interpersonal patterns, and ultimatelyleads to self-fulﬁlling prophecies and disturbed interpersonal rela-tions. Incorporating contemporary perspectives on consistency,variability and person–situation integration provides a strongfoundation for advancing the study of psychopathology.