Adaptive Meta-Regulation in Dyadic Systems - DSS III

This preprint introduces a meta-regulatory account of adaptation in romantic dyads, extending the preceding distinction between dyadic organisation in DSS-I and strain regulation in DSS-II. The paper asks when a dyadic system moves beyond regulating strain and becomes capable of revising the parameters governing its own regulation. It formalises recognition of systemic structure, attributional moralisation as epistemic noise, and learning activation as the joint condition under which salience structures, contextual damping, and escalation gates may become adaptively plastic. A central contribution is the distinction between regulation and adaptation. Dyads may contain conflict, reprioritise domains, or buffer strain for long periods without changing the structural conditions that repeatedly generate it. Adaptive change requires sufficiently accurate structural recognition and sufficiently low attributional distortion for error signals to remain informative. The paper further formalises asymmetric recalibration. Where one partner occupies a dominant share of a domain, durable reorganisation requires sustained dominant-initiated down-regulation before the other partner’s capacity can expand. This is presented as a feasibility constraint rather than a moral assignment of responsibility. The framework yields hypotheses H14–H18 concerning recognition thresholds, attributional inhibition, learning activation, dominant-initiated reorganisation, and long-term resilience. It also outlines longitudinal, EMA, experimental, and DSEM strategies for empirical examination. Mathematics in the Dyadic Systems Series is representational rather than foundational. Formal notation is used to make proposed mechanisms, constraints, dependencies, and directional tendencies explicit, internally consistent, and empirically addressable. The equations are neither exhaustive descriptions of lived relational dynamics nor claims that dyads perform numerical optimisation. The theoretical contribution resides in the identified system mechanics; formalisation provides a disciplined language through which those mechanics can be communicated, examined, and tested.