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Abstract
There have been numerous treatments in the clinical research literature about various
design, analysis, and interpretation considerations when testing hypotheses about
mechanisms and contingencies of effects, popularly known as mediation and moderation
analysis. In this paper we address the practice of mediation and moderation analysis
using linear regression in the pages of Behaviour Research and Therapy and offer some
observations and recommendations, debunk some popular myths, describe some new advances,
and provide an example of mediation, moderation, and their integration as conditional
process analysis using the PROCESS macro for SPSS and SAS. Our goal is to nudge clinical
researchers away from historically significant but increasingly old school approaches
toward modifications, revisions, and extensions that characterize more modern thinking
about the analysis of the mechanisms and contingencies of effects.