Superstitious behaviors persist across time, culture, and age. Although often considered irrational and even potentially harmful, superstitions have recently been shown to have positive effects on stress levels, confidence, and ultimately, performance. However, it remains unclear how people conceive of superstitious behaviors, specifically,…

Causal asymmetry is a situation where the causal factors under study are more suitable for explaining the outcome than its absence (or vice versa); they do not explain both equally well. In such a situation, presence of a cause leads to presence of the effect, but absence of the cause may not lead to absence of the effect. A conceptual discussion…

Currently, dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) and residual DSEM (RDSEM) are commonly used in testing intensive longitudinal data (ILD). Researchers are interested in ILD mediation models, but their analyses are challenging. The present paper mathematically derived, empirically compared, and step-by-step demonstrated three types (i.e.,…

Research in the social and behavioral sciences relies on a wide range of experimental and quasi-experimental designs to estimate the causal effects of specific programs, policies, and events. In this paper we highlight measurement issues relevant to evaluating the validity of causal estimation and generalization. These issues impact all four…

Causal evaluations in teacher education are rare. Underlying reasons include a lack of clearly defined treatments, a lack of research designs that can work in the context of teacher education programs, and a lack of resources for enacting these designs. This article provides a framework for how to fill these gaps. We first propose an approach to…

Purpose: The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) is frequently used in research settings to measure characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A short version has been developed but not yet tested for certain properties of the full SRS, such as familiality. The purpose of this study was to determine if prior familiality…

The purpose of this paper is to propose a revision of the well-known Campbellian system for causal research. The revised system, termed the COPS model, applies to both applied and basic research. Five validities are included, where two validities are adopted from the Campbellian system, and the validities are partly hierarchically ordered.…

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is an empirical research method that has gained some popularity in the social sciences. At the same time, the literature has long been convinced that QCA is prone to committing causal fallacies when confronted with non-causal data. More specifically, beyond a certain case-to-factor ratio, the method is…

Limited research has examined the active ingredients and mechanisms of change of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs). The present study used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design to develop a comprehensive Theory of Change of Project ImPACT, an empirically supported NDBI. We used qualitative data from interviews…

In the article "It's Just an Observation," Robinson and Wainer (Educational Psychology Review 35, Robinson, D., & Wainer, H. (2023). It's just an observation. Educational Psychology Review, 35(83), Published online: 14 August, 2023) lamented that educational psychology is moving toward the dark side of the quality continuum, with…

The use of structural equation models for causal inference from panel data is critiqued in the causal inference literature for unnecessarily relying on a large number of parametric assumptions, and alternative methods originating from the potential outcomes framework have been recommended, such as inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimation of…

People often rely on the covariation between events to infer causality. However, covariation between cues and outcomes may change over time. In the associative learning literature, extinction provides a model to study updating of causal beliefs when a previously established relationship no longer holds. Prediction error theories can explain both…

Purpose: Aging increases risk for hearing loss, cognitive decline, and social isolation; however, the nature of their interconnection remains unclear. This study examined the interplay between age-related hearing loss, cognitive decline, and social isolation in adults by testing the ability to understand speech in background noise, a challenge…

Purpose: Target word activation in picture naming was explored in children who stutter (CWS) and typically fluent children (TFC) using event-related potentials (ERPs). Method: A total of 18 CWS and 16 TFC completed a task combining picture naming and probe word identification. On each trial, a picture-to-be-named was followed by an auditory probe…

Mike accidentally knocked against a bottle. Seeing that the bottle was about to fall, Jack was just about to catch it when Peter accidentally knocked against him, making Jack unable to catch it. Jack did not grab the bottle, and it fell to the ground and spilled. In double-prevention cases like these, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike tend to…