Contemporary integrative interpersonal theory: Integrating structure, dynamics, temporal scale, and levels of...

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 socioaffective 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 the potential of CIIT 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).