In contrast with last years, 2016 will not demarcate drastic changes for Cognition and Emotion. One change that we do want to mention here is that due to the closure of the Hove office of Taylor and Francis, two prominent and loyal members of the support staff will no longer work for the journal: Mary Phillips and Sarah Scoffield. We hereby acknowledge their tremendous contribution and thank them very much for their continuous help over the years to smoothen the process from submission to print.
Last year, we announced the RRR (Registered Reports of Replication Studies) in Cognition and Emotion, which was launched in June 2015. The aim of this new section is to encourage direct or conceptual replications of studies that are central to enhancing our understanding of the interplay between cognition and emotion. Rather than evaluating research output after data collection has completed, the pre-registration format for this section is to evaluate proposals of research prior to data acquisition. We have not received any submissions yet, which we think may signal unfamiliarity with the procedure, or that scholars may be unaware of the fact that this is a possibility in Cognition and Emotion. Whatever the reason is, we do want to emphasise that we welcome such contributions, and we think it is an important and timely addition to the regular papers submitted to the journal.
Last year, we also sent out a call for Special Issues, which has resulted in a number of proposals. We will start this year with a Special Issue on Emotional Collectives (by Gerben van Kleef and Agneta Fischer), followed next year by a Special Issue on Anxiety and Depression (by Małgosia Fajkowska and Michael W. Eysenck). Both these Special Issues nicely illustrate the mission of our journal—to understand the interplay between cognition and emotion—and the broad scope in which these processes can be further studied, that is in social interaction and emotional disorder. To further underscore the broad scope of the journal, reflected in the wide range of expertise of our editors, we also intend to launch a special issue on the neurocognitive mechanisms of emotion. That said, our call for Special Issues remains open for new proposals (see http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/beh/pcem-cfp).
We have also renewed the tradition, started by our predecessors Jan de Houwer and Dirk Hermans, to invite scholars to write a review paper on a topic that is central to Cognition and Emotion. At this moment, the topics covered are: “Cognitive Bias Modification and Training” and “Emotion Regulation and Psychopathology”. We do not only consider review articles that are invited: Proposals concerning a review article can always be sent to us.
Finally, Cognition and Emotion is thriving: we have again seen an increase in submissions over 2015 whilst holding the average turn-around time of first submissions to 45 days on average. We want to explicitly thank our wise and loyal team of 2015 Associate Editors, Yair Bar-Haim, Linda Camras, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, Yulia Chentsova, Nathan Consedine, Wilco van Dijk, Thomas Ehring, Ursula Hess, Ernst Koster, Peter Kuppens, Christine Larson, Kateri McRae, Lauri Nummenmaa, Carolien Rieffe, John Roberts, Klaus Rothermund, Jon Rottenberg, Alexander Shackman, Eric Vanman and Mark Rotteveel, as well as the Associate Editors who recently stepped down, notably Isabelle Blanchette, Hanah Chapman, Iris Engelhard, and Hadas Okon-Singer. Of course our Board of Advisors and reviewers have also played a tremendous role in ensuring a high-quality and fast review process, and we hereby thank them too. We hope that you will enjoy yet another year of interesting and challenging papers to gain new insights, challenge the status quo, and raise new questions.