A content analysis of 2 years of Psychological Science articles reveals inconsistencies in how researchers make inferences about indirect effects when conducting a statistical mediation analysis. In this study, we examined the frequency with which popularly used tests disagree, whether the method an investigator uses makes a difference in the conclusion he or she will reach, and whether there is a most trustworthy test that can be recommended to balance practical and performance considerations. We found that tests agree much more frequently than they disagree, but disagreements are more common when an indirect effect exists than when it does not. We recommend the bias-corrected bootstrap confidence interval as the most trustworthy test if power is of utmost concern, although it can be slightly liberal in some circumstances. Investigators concerned about Type I errors should choose the Monte Carlo confidence interval or the distribution-of-the-product approach, which rarely disagree. The percentile bootstrap confidence interval is a good compromise test.

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Following Gaming Addiction Short Scale criteria, gaming addiction is currently not a widespread phenomenon among adolescents and adults in Germany. Gaming Addiction Short Scale scores are associated with intensive use, as well as certain problematic aspects of individuals' personalities and social lives.

The competitive reaction time task (CRTT) is the measure of aggressive behavior most commonly used in laboratory research. However, the test has been criticized for issues in standardization because there are many different test procedures and at least 13 variants to calculate a score for aggressive behavior. We compared the different published analyses of the CRTT using data from 3 different studies to scrutinize whether it would yield the same results. The comparisons revealed large differences in significance levels and effect sizes between analysis procedures, suggesting that the unstandardized use and analysis of the CRTT have substantial impacts on the results obtained, as well as their interpretations. Based on the outcome of our comparisons, we provide suggestions on how to address some of the issues associated with the CRTT, as well as a guideline for researchers studying aggressive behavior in the laboratory.

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