What is hidden in nonsignificant effects? Application of suppression analysis in social psychology.

This article discusses the topic of suppression effects that have often been reported in recent social psychological literature. Suppression takes place when a mediating variable enhances predictive power of independent variable on dependent variable. In this way we are able to capture with statistical analyses all sorts of theories of opponent processes that appear not only in motivation psychology but also in other areas of social psychology. Using latest social/personality psychology research examples, we describe three types of suppression effects (classical, net and cooperative) with possibilities of their use in research. At the end of the article we propose an example of suppression analysis conducted on fictional dataset. peerReviewed publishedVersion