ArticleFrontiers in psychology2014
A cautionary note on the power of the test for the indirect effect in mediation analysis.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Multidimensional Social Interaction and School Refusal Tendency Among Elementary and Junior High School Students: A Three-Year Longitudinal Study with an Exploratory Indirect-Association Analysis.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Relationships between combat injury, pain, mobility and post-service employment: the ADVANCE study.Occupational and environmental medicine · 2026Article
- Difficulties in emotion regulation, repetitive negative thinking, and sexual and psychological distress: a two-wave longitudinal mediation study using a transdiagnostic approach.Sexual medicine · 2025Article
- Is motor reserve associated with a rapid progression of Parkinson disease?Journal of Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- Clinical trials with mechanism evaluation of intervention(s): mind the power and sample size calculation.Trials · 2024Article
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- Validating Cross-Modal Measures for Comparative Research: Message Veracity, Novelty, and Memorability.Psychology & marketing · 2023Article
- Examining the effects of cumulative environmental stressors on Gulf Coast child and adolescent health.Population and environment · 2023Article
- Global heart warming: kama muta evoked by climate change messages is associated with intentions to mitigate climate change.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
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- The influence of the order and congruency of correct and erroneous worked examples on learning and (meta-)cognitive load.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Death Narratives, Negative Emotion, and Counterarguing: Testing Fear, Anger, and Sadness as Mechanisms of Effect.Journal of health communication · 2021Article
- Network of biomarkers and their mediation effects on the associations between regular exercise and the incidence of cardiovascular & metabolic diseases.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Studying Behaviour Change Mechanisms under Complexity.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Mendelian randomisation for mediation analysis: current methods and challenges for implementation.European journal of epidemiology · 2021Article
- Differential Susceptibility to the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Working Memory, Empathy, and Perceived Stress: The Role of Cortisol and Resilience.Brain sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent simulation studies have pointed to the higher power of the test for the mediated effect vs. the test for the total effect, even in the presence of a direct effect. This has motivated applied researchers to investigate mediation in settings where there is no evidence of a total effect. In this paper we provide analytical insight into the circumstances under which higher power of the test for the mediated effect vs. the test for the total effect can be expected in the absence of a direct effect. We argue that the acclaimed power gain is somewhat deceptive and comes with a big price. On the basis of the results, we recommend that when the primary interest lies in mediation only, a significant test for the total effect should not be used as a prerequisite for the test for the indirect effect. However, because the test for the indirect effect is vulnerable to bias when common causes of mediator and outcome are not measured or not accounted for, it should be evaluated in a sensitivity analysis.
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