A Parsimonious Form of Moderated Mediation In Psychological Science: Detecting Spurious Effects and Proposing Refinements to Model Specification.

This study introduces a parsimonious form of moderated mediation model that has been largely ignored in psychological sciences. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that neglecting its testing and the three methodological refinements proposed in this study would risk spurious conclusions – incorrectly inferring moderated mediation effects that do not really exist.