Enriching Psychological Assessment Using a Person-Specific Analysis of Interpersonal Processes in Daily Life

Abstract

We present a series of methods and approaches for clinicians interested in tracking their individual patients over time and in the natural settings of their daily lives. The application of person-specific analyses to intensive repeated measurement data can assess some aspects of persons that are distinct from the valuable results obtained from single-occasion assessments. Guided by interpersonal theory, we assess a psychotherapy patient's interpersonal processes as they unfold in his daily life. We highlight specific contexts that change these processes, use an informant report to examine discrepancies in his reported interpersonal processes, and examine how his interpersonal processes differ as a function of varying levels of self-esteem and anger. We advocate for this approach to complement existing psychological assessments and provide a scoring program to facilitate initial implementation.

Focusing Personality Assessment on the Person: Modeling General, Shared, and Person Specific Processes in Personality and Psychopathology

“…Recently there has been a push towards collecting data in ways that might reveal important dynamic processes using techniques, such as ambulatory assessment, that involve sampling individuals intensively and repeatedly over time and situations (Hamaker & Wichers, 2017). This trend has been accompanied by calls to use idiographic statistical techniques to develop "personalized models" of individuals' processes from the many repeated assessments collected (Fisher, 2015;Molenaar, 2004;Roche et al, 2014;van Os et al, 2013;Wichers et al, 2011;. These echo Allport's (1937) much earlier call that personality psychology should focus on the study of the whole person as the unit of analysis (i.e., personology).…”

“…In basic personality, there is longstanding precedent for using such data to develop idiographic models, that provide an idiosyncratic personality structure (e.g., Borkenau & Ostendorf, 1998;Cattell, Cattell, & Rhymer, 1947;Zevon & Tellegen, 1982). More recently, there have been numerous calls for using ambulatory assessment data coupled with idiographic analyses to develop "personalized" models of psychopathology (e.g., Fisher, 2015;Litten et al, 2015;Roche et al, 2014;van Os et al, 2013;. This is consistent with a broader push towards "personalized medicine" across clinical fields (Hamburg & Collins, 2010).…”

The NIH Science of Behavior Change Program: Transforming the science through a focus on mechanisms of change

“…Measures that may serve as starting points include those that are: observational (e.g., coding the content of verbal or nonverbal interactions); self-reports (e.g., questionnaires, interviews); field-based (e.g., ecological momentary assessment); population-level (e.g., ethnography); physiological (e.g., heart rate and respiration); neural (e.g., fMRI, PET, EEG); neuroendocrine (e.g., oxytocin and cortisol); and immunological (e.g., cytokine and granulocyte assays) (Coan, Schaefer & Davidson, 2006; Crowell et al, 2014; Ferrer & Helm, 2013; Janicki, Kamarck, Shiffman, & Gwaltney, 2006; Kiecolt-Glaser, Gouin, & Hantsoo, 2010; Levenson & Gottman, 1983; Rilling & Sanfey, 2011; Roche, Pincus, Rebar, Conroy, & Ram, 2014; Snyder, Heyman, & Haynes, 2005). Given the wide range of interpersonal and social processes implicated in health behavior change, as well as the overlap among targets, it has proven difficult to measure these targets consistently in the laboratory, in clinical trials, or in large scale observational studies.…”

Capturing Context-Related Change in Emotional Dynamics via Fixed Moderated Time Series Analysis

“…Single-subject analyses are a necessity in single-case studies, for instance in clinical settings (Roche, Pincus, Rebar, Conroy, & Ram, 2014). But also with repeated measures from many individuals, a "personcentered" or "ideographic" approach can be appropriate if one views it as enabling "informed aggregations of information across multiple participants" (Nesselroade, 2010, p. 211).…”

“…Complex and changing environments as well as ongoing developmental processes likely relate to variability and change in how we function and, thus, how psychological processes evolve over time (e.g., Hollenstein, LichtwarckAschoff, & Potworowski, 2013;Molenaar, 2004;Nesselroade, 1991). For instance, an individual's emotional dynamics may fluctuate within a certain range (Chow, Zu, Shifren, & Zhang, 2011;Koval & Kuppens, 2011;Ram et al, 2014;Sliwinski, Almeida, Smyth, & Stawski, 2009;Zautra et al, 2002), possibly reflecting "state-dependent regulation" (De Haan-Rietdijk, Gottman, Bergeman, & Hamaker, 2016, p. 217). Furthermore, the possibility of temporal trends in the variability and predictability of affect has received interest in the context of forecasting major regime shifts such as transitions into depression (Scheffer et al, 2009;van de Leemput et al, 2014).…”