“More bad science from JAMA”

In an abstract entitled, “Statistical dust and sweeping claims about maternal warmth,” John Richters and Everett Waters write:

Alley and colleagues draw on mediation analyses of longitudinal data from Millennium Cohort Study to argue that their findings “highlight the critically important role that childhood maternal warmth plays in shaping mental and physical health into late adolescence” (p. 716), and “suggest public health interventions aimed at increasing maternal warmth “may be particularly effective in positively impacting adolescent health” (p. 714).

Although the article is dense with tabularized information about key study variables, readers will search in vain for evidence to justify the authors’ conclusions and recommendations related to maternal warmth. What they will find instead are minuscule direct and mediated path coefficients (betas) linking maternal warmth to adolescent outcomes that amount to uninterpretable and unactionable statistical dust. The authors tell us as much in their seductively (if unintentionally) misleading statement that “Social safety at 14 years of age mediated 20% to 100% of the effect of early maternal warmth on physical health, psychological distress, and psychiatric problems at 17 years of age (b = 0.01-0.15; P < .001 for all)” (p. 709). A more straightforward, precise, and informative description of this finding is that social safety at age 14 mediated 20% of maternal warmth’s .01 effect on physical health, 60% of its .01 effect on psychiatric problems, and 100% of its .15 effect on psychological distress at age 17, for a total indirect effect of maternal warmth on subsequent outcome measures of less than 1%. The interpretability of these findings is further compromised by the extreme distributional skew of the 3-item social safety schema latent variable, with the vast majority of adolescents reporting that they had family and friends who helped them feel safe, secure, and happy (86%), someone they could turn to with problems (79%), and someone to whom they felt close (89%). The maternal warmth and harsh parenting measures are also marked by extreme distributional skew, with trained observers reporting that 86% of the mothers exhibited all 5 maternal warmth behaviors and 91% exhibited no harsh parenting behavior during naturalistic play with their children.

The authors do themselves and the readership of JAMA Psychiatry a great disservice by slipping through the normative scientific membrane and conflating statistical with theoretical and practical significance. This is an especially troubling breach within the context of contemporary concerns and public skepticism about the reliability and credibility of social and behavioral sciences research.

References

1. Alley J, Tsomokos DI, Mengelkoch S, Slavich GM. Childhood maternal warmth, social safety schemas, and adolescent mental and physical health. JAMA Psychiatry. 2025;82(7):709-717. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2025.0815

2. Bogdan PC. One decade into the replication crisis, how have psychological results changed? Adv Methods Pract Psychol Sci. 2025;8(2):25152459251323480. doi:10.1177/25152459251323480

3. Murray EJ, Swanson SA. Causal inference in observational psychiatry: What do we need to know? JAMA Psychiatry. 2023;80(6):539-540. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.0343

4. Richters JE. Incredible utility: The lost causes and causal debris of psychological science. Basic Appl Soc Psychol. 2021;43(6):366-405. doi:10.1080/01973533.2021.1994229

Ahhhh, JAMA!

P.S. JAMA’s not all bad. My colleagues and I recently published a short paper there! Just about all journals are a mix of good and bad.