ArticleJournal of consulting and clinical psychology2022
How to model and interpret cross-lagged effects in psychotherapy mechanisms of change research: A comparison of multilevel and structural equation models.
Article in Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Part II: Can School-Based Delivery of an Evidence-Based Parenting Program Promote the Home-School Partnership? Parental Self-Regulation as the Mechanism of Change.Family process · 2026Trial
- Positive Affect Treatment for Depression, Anxiety, and Low Positive Affect: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2026Trial
- Relationships Among Patients' Interpersonal Behaviors in Sessions, Therapist Competence, and the Therapeutic Alliance in Cognitive Behavior Therapy: A Cross-Lagged Panel Analysis.Journal of clinical psychology · 2026Trial
- A Cross-Lagged Panel Model Testing the Impact of Physical Activity During Hospitalization on 1- and 6-Month Discharge Physical Activity and Adverse Events Among Older Adults With Dementia.Journal of the American Medical Directors Association · 2025Trial
- Bidirectional week-to-week relationships between weekly psychological stress across multiple life domains and engagement with an exercise intervention: secondary analysis of data from a randomized trial.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2025Trial
- Mechanisms of Change in the Treatment of Depression: On the Role of Attachment, Reappraisal and Suppression.Clinical psychology & psychotherapyTrial
- Social technology use and life satisfaction in a five-wave panel study of US adults.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- A Within-Person Examination of the Family Stress Model: Family Income, Parental Distress, and Child Mental Health.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Targeting mechanisms of change as a path to precision psychotherapy for community settings.Psychotherapy research : journal of the Society for Psychotherapy Research · 2026Article
- The Role of Peer Victimisation and Parental Mental Health in Internalising Problems: Examining Bidirectional Relationships Across Childhood and Adolescence in Autistic Youth.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Obesity and Keratoconus: A Mediation Study Based on the Chinese Keratoconus Cohort.Translational vision science & technology · 2026Article
- A multilevel analysis of LGBT-relevant laws and sexual and gender minority mental health: evidence for the protective role of inclusive policies.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Article
- Deliberate practice in the age of artificial intelligence: how AI-assisted practice supports self-regulated learning and expert performance development in conservatory musicians.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Maladaptive appraisals and posttraumatic stress reactions in young terror survivors across 8 years: a random intercepts cross-lagged analysis.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
- Examining the Between- and Within-Person Associations Between Psychological Stress and Physical Activity: A Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of Change in Exposure Therapy for Anxiety and Related Disorders: A Research Agenda.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Dynamic cross-lagged effects between healthy lifestyles and multimorbidity among middle-aged and older adults in China.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Using intensive longitudinal assessment to study mechanisms of the Native American pain inequity among persons experiencing depression and/or anxiety: The role of interpersonal discrimination and stress.The journal of pain · 2025Article
- School guidance support and growth in mathematics discourse feedback skills: a three-wave longitudinal mediation study.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveModeling cross-lagged effects in psychotherapy mechanisms of change studies is complex and requires careful attention to model selection and interpretation. However, there is a lack of field-specific guidelines. We aimed to (a) describe the estimation and interpretation of cross lagged effects using multilevel models (MLM) and random-intercept cross lagged panel model (RI-CLPM); (b) compare these models' performance and risk of bias using simulations and an applied research example to formulate recommendations for practice.
methodPart 1 is a tutorial focused on introducing/describing dynamic effects in the form of autoregression and bidirectionality. In Part 2, we compare the estimation of cross-lagged effects in RI-CLPM, which takes dynamic effects into account, with three commonly used MLMs that cannot accommodate dynamics. In Part 3, we describe a Monte Carlo simulation study testing model performance of RI-CLPM and MLM under realistic conditions for psychotherapy mechanisms of change studies.
resultsOur findings suggested that all three MLMs resulted in severely biased estimates of cross-lagged effects when dynamic effects were present in the data, with some experimental conditions generating statistically significant estimates in the wrong direction. MLMs performed comparably well only in conditions which are conceptually unrealistic for psychotherapy mechanisms of change research (i.e., no inertia in variables and no bidirectional effects). DISCUSSION: Based on conceptual fit and our simulation results, we strongly recommend using fully dynamic structural equation modeling models, such as the RI-CLPM, rather than static, unidirectional regression models (e.g., MLM) to study cross-lagged effects in mechanisms of change research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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