The Impact Message Inventory (IMI-C): generalizability of patients' command and relationship messages across psychiatric nurses.

This paper tests the hypothesis that patients' stereotypical dysfunctional interpersonal communication styles would be validly measurable by the command or relationship messages experienced by psychiatric nurses while interacting with the patient in the relatively unstructured every day context of the psychiatric ward. The generalizability of interpersonal pressures exerted by patients was tested by having different psychiatric nurses independently appraise patients' command or relationship messages with the Impact Message Inventory, circumplex version (IMI-C). Generalizability of interpersonal pressures strongly depended on the specific combination of psychiatric nurses. Out of eight classes of command or relationships three turned out to be generalizable across nurses: Dominance, Hostile-Submissive and Friendly Dominance.