An alternative approach to analysis of mental states in experimental social cognition research

Establishing the mental states that affect human behavior is a primary goal of experiments on social cognitive processes. Such mental states can be manipulated only indirectly; therefore, after delivering a manipulation, researchers attempt to verify that the mental state of interest, the representation of a mental state, was in fact changed by the manipulation and that this change caused the observed effect. The usual procedure is to examine mean differences in a measure of the mental state of interest (a manipulation check) among experimental conditions and to infer whether the manipulation was effective. We describe a procedure that strengthens the construct validity of manipulations and, hence, causal inferences in experiments that focus on mental states using analyses familiar to most researchers. This procedure employs a traditional manipulation check that assesses the relationship between manipulations and mental states but, additionally, tests the relationship between the manipulation check and dependent measure.

[1]  P. Shrout,et al.  Mediation in experimental and nonexperimental studies: new procedures and recommendations. , 2002, Psychological methods.

[2]  M. Hardy.  Regression with dummy variables , 1993 .

[3]  N. Weinstein.  Unrealistic optimism about future life events , 1980 .

[4]  Victoria Savalei,et al.  Assessing Mediational Models: Testing and Interval Estimation for Indirect Effects , 2010, Multivariate behavioral research.

[5]  L. Cronbach.  The two disciplines of scientific psychology. , 1957 .

[6]  S. West,et al.  A comparison of methods to test mediation and other intervening variable effects. , 2002, Psychological methods.

[7]  S. Bench.  The Effects of Automatic Emotion Regulation on the Desirability Bias , 2011 .

[8]  T. Cook,et al.  Quasi-experimentation: Design & analysis issues for field settings , 1979 .

[9]  E. Loftus,et al.  The Formation of False Memories , 1995 .

[10]  D. Mackinnon,et al.  Tests of the Three-Path Mediated Effect , 2008 .

[11]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Correlation and causality , 1979 .

[12]  Matthew S. Fritz,et al.  Distribution of the product confidence limits for the indirect effect: Program PRODCLIN , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[13]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  Effect size measures for mediation models: quantitative strategies for communicating indirect effects. , 2011, Psychological methods.

[14]  S. West,et al.  Multiple Regression: Testing and Interpreting Interactions. , 1994 .

[15]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models , 2008, Behavior research methods.

[16]  Heather C. Lench,et al.  Discrete emotions predict changes in cognition, judgment, experience, behavior, and physiology: a meta-analysis of experimental emotion elicitations. , 2011, Psychological bulletin.

[17]  S. Fiske,et al.  The Handbook of Social Psychology , 1935 .

[18]  Klaus Fiedler,et al.  What mediation analysis can (not) do , 2011 .

[19]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. , 1986, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  Kipling D. Williams,et al.  Social Ostracism by Coworkers: Does Rejection Lead to Loafing or Compensation? , 1997 .

[21]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health. , 1988, Psychological bulletin.

[22]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  Addressing Moderated Mediation Hypotheses: Theory, Methods, and Prescriptions , 2007, Multivariate behavioral research.

[23]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  Experimentation in social psychology. , 1998 .

[24]  Michael E. Sobel,et al.  Causal inference in randomized and non-randomized studies: The definition, identification, and estimation of causal parameters. , 2009 .

[25]  David P Mackinnon,et al.  Confidence Limits for the Indirect Effect: Distribution of the Product and Resampling Methods , 2004, Multivariate behavioral research.

[26]  P. Bentler.  MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS WITH LATENT VARIABLES: CAUSAL MODELING , 1980 .

[27]  David P. MacKinnon,et al.  R2 effect-size measures for mediation analysis , 2009, Behavior research methods.

[28]  T. Little.  The Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology, Vol. 1 , 2013 .

[29]  W. Shadish,et al.  Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference , 2001 .

[30]  P. Holland.  Statistics and Causal Inference , 1985 .

[31]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models , 2004, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[32]  Harold Sigall,et al.  Measures of Independent Variables and Mediators Are Useful in Social Psychology Experiments: But Are They Necessary? , 1998, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[33]  A. Greenwald,et al.  Under what conditions does theory obstruct research progress? , 1986, Psychological review.

[34]  R. Zajonc.  Feeling and thinking : Preferences need no inferences , 1980 .

[35]  D. Mackinnon.  Introduction to Statistical Mediation Analysis , 2008 .

[36]  Rainer Reisenzein,et al.  A Structural Equation Analysis of Weiner's Attribution-Affect Model of Helping Behavior , 1986 .

[37]  Heather C. Lench.  Automatic optimism: the affective basis of judgments about the likelihood of future events. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[38]  L. James,et al.  Mediators, Moderators, and Tests for Mediation. , 1984 .

[39]  U. Kühnen.  Manipulation Checks as Manipulation: Another Look at the Ease-of-Retrieval Heuristic , 2010, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[40]  J. Edwards,et al.  Methods for integrating moderation and mediation: a general analytical framework using moderated path analysis. , 2007, Psychological methods.

[41]  John G Bullock,et al.  Yes, But What's the Mechanism? (Don't Expect an Easy Answer) , 2010, Journal of personality and social psychology.