Pairmutate: A Web Application for Testing Dyadic Associations Through Comparison With Pseudo Dyads

Recently, a lot of attention in the behavioral sciences has been going to how feelings, thoughts, or behaviors overlap, covary, or synchronize across time within dyadic relationships, such as romantic couples or parent–child pairs. This is often investigated by computing and testing an association measure within each dyad. However, two individuals may demonstrate similar responses and thus association simply because they are in the same experimental conditions, have similar social or cultural backgrounds, or just share basic biological functions rather than that the observed similarity can be attributed to true interpersonal processes. This “common input” phenomenon is known to increase the probability of false positives when testing dyadic associations. Permutation testing allows one to account for it by comparing associations based on data from true dyads with associations based on data from pseudo dyads. Pseudo dyads are formed by coupling partners from different dyads in the sample. Although this approach has been proven valuable in dyadic research, it is conceptually and computationally complex and thus not readily accessible. In this tutorial, we explain the logic behind testing dyadic associations using pseudo dyads and introduce and demonstrate a newly developed web application called “Pairmutate” for this purpose.