Whereas 2016 has been a year of consolidation of Cognition and Emotion’s impact on the field, 2017 will probably the year in which C&E will face new developments. We will be outgoing editors, and Cognition and Emotion will have new editors designate, starting in January 2017. At the time of writing, no final decisions regarding the new editorial team have been made yet. Hence, we write this year's editorial, which is also our last one. When we started our editorial job in 2013 the world of psychological research was still more or less in shape, although it was also clear that cracks were starting to appear on the surface of excellence, innovation and significance.
In our first editorial, which appeared in January 2012, we indeed already referred to the importance of replicability and transparency. These topics can no longer be ignored or conceived of as hick-ups of a small minority of radical researchers. We have become a signatory of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, an initiative by the OSF (https://osf.io/9f6gx/). The TOP Guidelines are meant to promote transparency as part of a journal's editorial policy and author guidelines and can be implemented at different levels. We have started this process, but it is obvious that there is still a long way to go, and we need all Associate Editors and reviewers as well as authors to join this effort. This is a new and challenging task for our successors.
The need for replication has also become vital for the future of psychology, and probably many other sciences. Still, there are many different perspectives on how we should proceed, which is an interesting issue for Editors in Chief. We firmly believe that journal editors should be at forefront of the new developments in psychological science, which is the reason why we started the RRR section 2 years ago. It is also noticeable that the number of replication submissions to our journal has been increasing, but not as part of the RRR section. This is an interesting discrepancy, which is probably partly due to the fact that it takes time to develop this, but it does need further thought.
Having conducted preregistered, direct replications ourselves, we think that RRR procedures may have a bad reputation, not only because it seems uncreative, but mainly because direct replications need to follow the original protocol as closely as possible which is not always easy to do. However, we think they are very important, because the aim is not only to examine whether these protocols still work, but also to discuss the meaning of failed or successful replications and the follow-up steps. Replications are, in practice, often problematic, because of differences between labs, participants, the different interpretation of materials or questions due to language or cultural differences, outdated stimuli, software or hardware, and so on. Given that researchers are generally not too happy if their findings are not replicated, they always try to find explanations. In the recent multi-lab replication of the 1988 facial feedback experiment by Fritz Strack and colleagues, for example, there was one deviation from the original experiment: the presence of cameras. Another difference was the fact that the cover story was outdated, and probably may have generated a very different motivation back in 1988 compared to 2016. The question is whether these factors can account for the non-replicability of the effect, and whether they should have been adjusted. Only new studies that take this potential factor into account can tell. The question then becomes whether it makes sense to always follow the original protocol meticulously, and which deviations from the original protocol are acceptable. We obviously need more time and more examples to further discuss such issues; we can only adapt the replication rules if we have sufficient examples of good and bad replication practices.
Finally, Cognition and Emotion is thriving: the total download of articles has further increased, we experienced an increase in submissions of approx 20% since taking over the rein in 2013, and the number of submissions over 2016 continues to rise. Despite an increase in the number of submissions, we kept the average turn-around time of first submissions to 54 days. From the bottom of our heart, we want to thank our wise and loyal team of Associate Editors for their efforts in 2016: Amelia Aldao, 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, Deborah Talmi, Eric Vanman and Mark Rotteveel. Of course we also thank our Board of Advisors and all reviewers who are so important in ensuring a high quality and fast review process.