Three decades of Cognition & Emotion: A brief review of past highlights and future prospects

ABSTRACT

Over the past three decades, Cognition & Emotion has been one of the world’s leading outlets for emotion research. In this article, we review past highlights of and future prospects for the journal. Our tour of history covers three periods: The first period, from 1987 to 1999, was a pioneering era in which cognitive theories began to be applied to the scientific analysis of emotion. The second period, from 2000 to 2007, was characterised by a sharp increase in the number of empirical research papers, a lot of which were concerned with automatic processing biases and their implications for clinical psychology. During the third period, from 2008 to 2017, a new focus emerged on self-regulatory processes and their implications for emotion. We then turn to the present profile of Cognition & Emotion and introduce our new editorial team. Finally, we consider how the journal’s future success can be continued and increased by a) providing authors with fast and high-quality feedback; b) offering attractive publication formats, including the newly introduced Registered Reports for pre-registered studies; and c) consolidating key methodological paradigms with reproducible findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical review
• cognition and emotion
• cognitive theories of emotion
• affective processing biases
• emotion regulation
• psychopathology

Within Western thought, cognition and emotion have traditionally been conceived as adversaries. However, it is also possible to conceive of emotion within a cognitive framework (e.g. Leventhal & Scherer, 1987), or to consider cognition and emotion as integrated neural networks (Pessoa, 2008). These and other perspectives on the relation between cognition and emotion are actively studied and debated across many scientific disciplines. This work is not just of academic interest, because the relation between cognition and emotion has far-ranging implications for such diverse domains as psychotherapy, education, communication, and interpersonal relations. All these matters are central to the mission of the journal Cognition & Emotion, which in the broadest sense seeks to advance the scientific understanding of the relation between cognition and emotion.

Thirty years ago, in January 1987, the first issue of Cognition & Emotion was published. From that time onwards, the journal has been one of the world’s premier outlets for emotion research. With each passing year, the volume of research on the interface between cognition and emotion has grown, thereby increasing the field’s visibility and bringing an accelerating succession of theoretical and methodological innovations. Throughout these times of expansion and growth, the place of Cognition & Emotion has been always at the scientific frontlines, pushing ahead and providing a platform for a growing community of researchers.

As incoming editors, we want to honour the many outstanding contributions to Cognition & Emotion that were made by the authors, reviewers, and editors over the years. At the 25th anniversary of the journal, some of the previous editors of the journal published a historical review that traced emotion research back to its roots in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Darwin (Oatley, Parrott, Smith, & Watts, 2011). In the present article, we complement this broad historical perspective by taking a closer look at the development of Cognition & Emotion itself in the first three decades of its existence. After this brief excursion into the past, we turn to the journal as it is today and consider its future prospects, by presenting our new editorial team, along with our editorial policies and plans for ensuring the continuing health and success of Cognition & Emotion.

Revisiting the past

To trace the historical development of Cognition & Emotion, we dug into the archives and went over the back issues of the journal. We realise that, with this approach, we cannot do justice to all the hard work that has taken place behind the scenes. For instance, there are the many efforts by the publisher to manufacture and market the journal; the contacts between the publisher and the editors; the associate editors of the journal and the consulting editors who provide regular reviews; and the countless anonymous reviewers for the journal. Though most of these labours have typically gone unacknowledged, they have been nonetheless vital to the day-to-day functioning and success of the journal. Moreover, given that Cognition & Emotion has long had a rejection rate in the range of 80% and upward, much of the editorial work has been about determining what work does not belong in the journal. The latter work has been arguably no less important, though much less visible, in shaping the journal’s profile than determining what work does belong in it.

Despite these caveats, the journal’s back issues represent a rich resource about the past achievements of Cognition & Emotion. Indeed, it is not possible for us to do justice here to the thousands of articles that can be found in these back issues. Instead, we limit ourselves to a selective review of what we consider to be the highlights and major trends. In our selection, we pay special attention to editorials, special issues, review papers, and highly cited articles. For convenience, we parsed our review into three periods, which correspond with changes in the Editors-in-Chief. A shorthand overview of our review is provided in Table 1. Moreover, the special issues of each period are listed in Tables 2– 4.

Table 1. Highlights from 30 years of Cognition & Emotion.

	Editors	Three most cited papers	Major trends
1987–1999: The pioneering years	Fraser Watts (Founding Editor, 1987–1995) Gerrod W. Parrott (1995–1999)	1. Ekman (1992). An argument for basic emotions. 2. Davidson (1998a). Affective style and affective disorders: Perspectives from affective neuroscience. 3. Gross and Levenson (1995). Emotion elicitation using films.	Formulation of modern appraisal theories Rise of biological theories of emotion Development of rigorous paradigms for studying emotion-cognition interactions
2000–2007: The rise of empiricism	Craig Smith (2000–2007)	1. Fredrickson and Branigan (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. 2. Lerner and Keltner (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. 3. Fox, Russo, and Dutton (2002). Attentional bias for threat: Evidence for delayed disengagement from emotional faces.	Rise of attentional bias research Age of automaticity in affective processing and evaluation Increased study of social and cultural context of emotion
2008–2017: Sustained growth and reproducibility crisis	Jan De Houwer & Dirk Hermans (2008–2012) Agneta Fischer & Carien van Reekum (2013–2017)	1. Langner et al. (2010). Presentation and validation of the Radboud Faces Database. 2. Koole (2009). The psychology of emotion regulation: An integrative review. 3. Mauss and Robinson (2009). Measures of emotion: A review.	Emerging consensus on emotions as multi-modal systems Rise of affective neuroscience Increased study of higher-order cognitive processes like working memory and emotion regulation

Table 2. Special issues in Cognition & Emotion: 1987–1999.

Guest editor/s (year)	Title
Oatley (1987)	Cognitive science and the understanding of emotions
Watts (1988)	Repression, catharsis, and dreaming
Mathews (1988)	Information processing and the emotional disorders
Izard (1989)	Development of emotion-cognition relations
Watts (1990)	Evaluative conditioning
Manstead (1991)	Emotion in social life
Stein and Oatley (1992)	Basic emotions: Theory and measurement
Frijda (1993a)	Appraisal and beyond
Dunn (1995)	Children’s cognitive and emotional development
Gotlib, Kurtzman, and Blehar (1997)	The cognitive psychology of depression
Davidson (1998b)	Neuropsychological perspectives on affective and anxiety disorders

1987–1999: The pioneering years

In the present day and age, research on emotion and its interface with cognition is widely accepted as a legitimate scientific enterprise. However, this was not always the case. During the 1980s, when Cognition & Emotion became established as a journal, the question was still hotly debated as to whether emotion was amenable to rigorous empirical inquiry. This debate took place in the wake of the cognitive revolution, which allowed psychologists from the 1960s and onwards to reclaim the freedom to theorise about inner mental states (Miller, 2003; Sperry, 1993). The initial focus of cognitive psychologists was on “cold” cognition, such as language acquisition, visual perception, and problem solving. However, it was not long before psychologists realised that the cognitive paradigm could be extended to “hot” cognition, thus bringing the study of emotion back to the mainstream.

The idea for the journal of Cognition & Emotion arose between Fraser Watts and Mark Williams (see Oatley et al., 2011). Watts and Williams were trying to understand the role of cognitive processes in emotion disorders, and how these could be modified by cognitive therapy. They noted that the interplay between cognition and emotion was also studied in other fields, such as developmental psychology and social psychology, but there was little communication between these fields. Watts therefore founded Cognition & Emotion as a broadly conceived journal that could bring work from different disciplines together and help to establish coherence in the study of the cognition–emotion interface.

In January 1987, the first issue of Cognition & Emotion saw the light of day. After the editorial, the first article that appeared in the journal was a theoretical article by Howard Leventhal and Klaus Scherer (Leventhal & Scherer, 1987). The latter was a triple first, as the first genuine article of the first issue of the first year of Cognition & Emotion. We therefore take the liberty to consider this article in somewhat more detail. Leventhal and Scherer reviewed one of the major debates of the time, which was held between Lazarus and Zajonc on the primacy of emotion versus cognition. To overcome the opposite sides of this debate, Leventhal and Scherer proposed a componential model in which emotions are seen as complex cognitive-evaluative patterns resulting from an integration of different levels of memory and information processing. Importantly, emotions go beyond simple, reflex-like sensory-motor processes in that they allow for more flexible responding under constantly changing environmental conditions. The specifics of the conceptualisation of emotion continue to be debated and elaborated. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that, at present, Leventhal and Scherer’s view of emotions as multi-componential systems has become widely adopted (e.g. Boiger & Mesquita, 2012; Gross & Feldman-Barrett, 2011; Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer, & Frijda, 2013).

Leventhal and Scherer’s (1987) article is representative of the kinds of articles that were published in the pioneering period, in which the first volumes of Cognition & Emotion featured many theoretical articles that were rooted in or building on appraisal theories of emotion (e.g. Ellsworth & Smith, 1988; Lazarus & Smith, 1988; Leventhal & Scherer, 1987; Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987). The first special issue to appear in the journal addressed the role of cognitive science for the understanding of emotions (Oatley, 1987, see Table 2). Other articles highlighted the social and contextual embeddedness of emotion (Bradbury & Fincham, 1987; Conway & Bekerian, 1987) and the important functions of emotion for activating and regulating action tendencies (Frijda, 1987; Weiner & Graham, 1989). The latter topics were repeatedly revisited, for instance, in special issues on the function of emotion (Parrott, 1999) and on culture and emotion (Manstead & Fischer, 2002).

The interdependence of cognitive and emotional development during infancy and childhood also featured regularly in the initial volumes of Cognition & Emotion. This theme is also reflected in the special issue on the development of emotion–cognition relations (Izard, 1989), and another special issue on children’s cognitive and emotional development (Dunn, 1995, see Table 2). Several of these contributions went on to become milestones of cognition and emotion research in the subsequent years, and they served to establish a shared understanding of the deep conceptual relations between cognition and emotion. Cognitive accounts of emotion also provided the basis for numerous later studies on “discrete emotions” like envy, schadenfreude, guilt or shame that have their roots in specific cognitive appraisals.

The journal’s cognitive emphasis was balanced by a fair number of other theoretical articles focusing on the biological functions and physiological bases of emotion (e.g. Ekman, 1992; Gray, 1990; LeDoux, 1989; Miller et al., 1987). Indeed, two of the most widely cited articles of the pioneering years are Ekman’s (1992) case for basic emotions, and Davidson’s (1998a) introduction to affective neuroscience. The recognition of the biological perspective in Cognition & Emotion was further cemented by three special issues, one on basic emotions in 1992, one on neuroscience and emotion in 1993, and one on neuropsychological perspectives on affective and anxiety disorders 1998 (see Table 2). The openness to different theoretical positions and perspectives rendered Cognition & Emotion a unique platform for basic theoretical discussions.

Articles in Cognition & Emotion further contributed to the development of rigorous research paradigms. One case in point is Gross and Levenson’s (1995) research on how to elicit emotional states using films, which is one of the top 3 most cited articles from the pioneering years. Moreover, in the second year of the journal, there was a special issue that established research on attentional biases as a core instrument for the analysis of psychopathology (Mathews, 1988). Two years later, another special issue addressed the phenomenon of evaluative conditioning (Watts, 1990, see Table 2), which has become another recurring theme in the journal.

Under the editorial guidance of Fraser Watts and Gerrod Parrott, Cognition & Emotion became the premier outlet for research on emotion. Cutting across disciplinary borders, the journal served as a focal point for the newly emerging emotion science. Moreover, Cognition & Emotion provided a unique combination of theoretical articles covering the entire area of the field, paradigm-oriented empirical research with strong links to cognitive psychology, and articles linking the cognition–emotion interface to psychopathology.

2000–2007: The rise of empiricism

The central themes of the pioneering years of Cognition & Emotion remained important to the journal in the first half of the 2000s, when Craig Smith was at the helm of the journal. For instance, as can be seen in Table 1, one of the most cited papers of this period was a theoretical paper by Lerner and Keltner (2000), who elaborated an appraisal model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. Moreover, as can be seen in Table 3, a special issue in honour of the pioneering appraisal theorist Magda Arnold (Shields & Kappas, 2006) marked the journal’s continuing recognition of the importance of appraisal theories of emotion.

Table 3. Special issues in Cognition & Emotion: 2000–2007.

Guest editor/s (year)	Title
Schwarz (2000)	Emotion, cognition, and decision making
De Houwer and Hermans (2001)	Automatic affective processing
Manstead and Fischer (2002)	Culture and emotion: Beyond the universality-specificity dichotomy
Hertel (2002)	Cognitive biases in anxiety and depression
Russell (2003)	The return of pleasure
Wessel and Wright (2004)	Emotional memory failures
De Houwer, Baeyens, and Field (2005)	Associative learning of likes and dislikes
Raes, Hermans, Philppot, and Kremers (2006)	Autobiographical memory specificity and psychopathology
Shields and Kappas (2006)	Magda B. Arnold’s contributions to emotion research and theory
Eder, Hommel, and De Houwer (2007)	How distinctive is affective processing? On the implications of using cognitive paradigms to study affect and emotion

Table 4. Special issues in Cognition & Emotion: 2008–2017.

Guest editor/s (year)	Title
Field, Cartwright-Hatton, Reynolds, and Creswell (2008)	Child anxiety theory and treatment
Kuppens, Stouten, and Mesquita (2009)	Individual differences in emotion components and dynamics
Derakshan and Eysenck (2010)	Emotional states, attention, and working memory
Koole and Rothermund (2011)	The psychology of implicit emotion regulation
Isaacowitz and Riediger (2011)	When age matters: Developmental perspectives on cognition and emotion
Hareli and Hess (2012)	The social signal value of emotions
van Kleef and Fischer (2016)	Emotional collectives: How groups shape emotions and emotions shape groups

Besides this thematic continuity, there was also an important change in the kinds of articles that appeared in Cognition & Emotion. From the outset, the journal had published a combination of theoretical and empirical articles. Whereas the first volumes of Cognition & Emotion had up to 50% or more theoretical articles, the balance shifted over the years towards empirical articles, which up to the present day take up more than 90% of the journal. The shift in emphasis from grand theories towards a somewhat more mundane, day-to-day research agenda marks an important step in establishing and consolidating an empirical branch of science. Empirical articles tend to address more specific questions than theoretical articles. Rather than discussing the same big questions over and over again, the big questions were successively broken down into smaller questions that are tractable to empirical investigation. As a result, the field redefined scientific progress as more of a practical task of conducting specific studies to obtain concrete answers to specific research questions.

During the second period, articles published in Cognition & Emotion continued to come from various sub-disciplines within psychology. The journal was thus never dominated by a single research paradigm. Still, not all paradigms were created equal, and some paradigms were considerably more influential than others. Arguably most influential has been the attentional bias paradigm, which has championed such experimental procedures as the dot-probe task, the flanker task, and the Stroop task to investigate attention for emotional information. Representative of this paradigm is one of the most widely cited papers from the early 2000s by Fox et al. (2002) on attentional bias for threat. The attentional bias paradigm is further represented by Hertel’s (2002) special issue on cognitive biases in anxiety and depression. The latter illustrates a major strength of the paradigm, namely, its relevance for clinical psychology.

Other influential paradigms were inspired by developments in neighbouring disciplines such as social psychology, decision science, and memory research. Within social psychology, for instance, there was a growing interest in the role of emotions in relationships and across cultures (e.g. Mesquita & Karasawa, 2002; Rodriguez Mosquera, Manstead, & Fischer, 2002), and social emotions like guilt, shame, envy, and anger (De Hooge, Zeelenberg, & Breugelmans, 2007; Ketelaar & Tung Au, 2003; Lerner & Keltner, 2000; Vecchio, 2005). These new foci also became evident in special issues addressing autobiographical memory specificity and psychopathology (Raes et al., 2006), emotion and cognition in decision-making (Schwarz, 2000), and automatic affective processing (De Houwer & Hermans, 2001). Notably, evaluative learning (De Houwer et al., 2005) was featured again as the focus of a special issue. Unlike the first special issue on this topic (Watts, 1990), however, the second special issue had a decidedly more cognitive focus on automaticity and experimental paradigms of implicit evaluation.

The second period culminated in a special issue that addressed one of the most central questions of Cognition & Emotion: How distinctive is affective processing? (Eder et al., 2007). In the pioneering period of the journal, this question would likely have been answered by invoking large theoretical frameworks, such as appraisal theory or basic emotion theory. In the new empirical age, however, the question was answered in a more pragmatic and simultaneously more detail-oriented way, through careful analyses of experimental paradigms, taken from cognitive psychology, and by thorough investigation of the commonalities and differences when these paradigms are applied to cognitive versus emotional processing.

2008–2017: Sustained growth and reproducibility crisis

During the 2000s, emotion research went through a period of accelerating growth. More and more academic programmes around the world included emotion research in their curriculum. This led to increasing numbers of researchers who were conducting high-quality emotion research, and, correspondingly, caused the numbers of submissions to Cognition & Emotion to swell from a trickle to a powerful stream. To accommodate the growing number of submissions, the size of the journal was successively increased: The journal started with four issues per year, with a total of roughly 400 pages. By the 2000s, however, the journal’s volumes had twice as many issues, and a total of around 1,800 pages, more than a fourfold increase since the journal was founded.

The spectacular growth of emotion research did not go unnoticed by other publishers. In 2001, the American Psychological Association launched Emotion, a journal with similar aims and scope as Cognition & Emotion. In the same year, Springer came forward with the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. In 2006, Oxford University Press introduced Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, and in 2009, the publisher Sage launched Emotion Review, a journal devoted to publishing theoretical and review papers in the field of emotion research. These new arrivals on the scientific scene were more than welcome, considering that Cognition & Emotion by this time was receiving far more submissions than it was able to accommodate, with the journal’s rejection rates soaring to 80% and higher. At the same time, however, these developments meant that Cognition & Emotion was no longer the only player in the field. From now on, the journal had to prove its value to prospective authors.

In view of the increasing workload that came with editing the journal, Cognition & Emotion has been headed by two editors since 2007. The first team consisted of Jan De Houwer and Dirk Hermans, whose tenure ran from 2007 to 2011. De Houwer and Hermans brought a new dynamic to the journal that allowed it to reach new heights. Among other things, De Houwer and Hermans introduced a number of editorial innovations that promoted a faster turnaround while maintaining the overall high quality of the review process. De Houwer and Hermans further started the tradition of publishing an annual editorial in which they reviewed any developments relating to the journal. De Houwer and Hermans maintained the tradition of having an annual special issue. Moreover, in recognition of the importance of having integrative work in a fast-growing field of research, De Houwer and Hermans invited a series of reviews of key areas. Several of these articles ended up among the most widely cited papers of the last decade of Cognition & Emotion, including Koole’s (2009) review on emotion regulation and Mauss and Robinson’s (2009) review of measures of emotion. The invited review articles were published together as an edited volume (De Houwer & Hermans, 2010).

Thematically, there has been a good deal of continuity for articles published in Cognition & Emotion since the second period. The main new arrival was the growing attention for processes of emotion regulation. Arguably, this topic had been part of the agenda of emotion research from the beginning (e.g. Lazarus, Opton, Nomikos, & Rankin, 1965). However, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation has remained contested (Kappas, 2011; Mesquita & Frijda, 2011). Gross, Sheppes, and Urry (2011a, 2011b) argued that the distinction can be misused, but remains useful overall, in terms of stimulating new research and affording new testable predictions. Perhaps because of this controversy, it took some time, before the topic of emotion regulation fully manifested itself on the pages of Cognition & Emotion. In a highly influential paper that was published in the journal, James Gross (1999) defined a new systematic approach for the study of strategic emotion regulation. The theme of emotion regulation was connected to the study of implicit affective processes in a special issue on implicit emotion regulation (Koole & Rothermund, 2011), which featured an influential review article by Gyurak, Gross, and Etkin (2011).

There was further a renewed interest in developmental changes in emotion and emotion regulation. Complementing an earlier focus on the interplay between cognition and emotion in infancy and childhood (Dunn, 1995; Izard, 1989), a new interest emerged with regard to age-related changes across the life span. The new life span perspective has linked research on emotion with related fields of self-regulation, coping, and development in old age (Brandtstädter & Rothermund, 2002; Carstensen, 1995). The emerging life span perspective was further covered by a special issue (Isaacowitz & Riediger, 2011).

In 2012, Agneta Fischer and Carien van Reekum stepped in as the new Editors-in-Chief of Cognition & Emotion. Under Fischer and van Reekum, the journal kept its course, largely publishing articles with the same thematic contents and maintaining an emphasis on empirical articles. What is arguably the most important change to the journal was prompted by external circumstances: In the wake of much-publicized cases of data fraud and methodological criticisms, concerns had arisen about the reproducibility of research in psychology (Koole & Lakens, 2012; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011), and indeed, in science at large (Baker, 2016; Ioannidis, 2005).

Reproducibility concerns became especially salient for emotion researchers when a large-scale replication effort failed to find confirmatory evidence for a classic study by Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) on the effects of facial feedback on positive and negative affect (Wagenmakers et al., 2016; but see Strack, 2016). In view of these and related developments, Fischer and van Reekum decided to create a new section in Cognition & Emotion for Registered Replication Reports (RRR). This RRR section allowed researchers to submit proposals for replication studies, provided that they were of sufficient methodological quality and importance to the field. Unfortunately, the RRR section has not yet drawn many submissions, perhaps because the field needs some time to adjust to the new research climate. Nevertheless, the RRR section demonstrates the commitment of Cognition & Emotion to the goals of testing and improving the reproducibility of emotion research. In fact, the first two pre-registered replication studies were accepted for publication in 2017 under the editorship of Fischer and van Reekum. These studies appear in the same issue as the present article (Samur, Tops, & Koole, 2018; Tibboel, 2018). One of these articles is co-authored by one of the new editors. The latter seems fitting given that we see reproducibility as a key priority for the future of Cognition & Emotion, as we discuss in the next section.

On a very sad note, Nico Frijda passed away in 2015. As one of the great pioneers of modern emotion research, Frijda made important contributions to Cognition & Emotion in each of the three decades of the journal’s existence (e.g. Frijda, 1987, 1993b; Mesquita & Frijda, 2011). Batja Mesquita (2016) wrote a moving tribute for Cognition & Emotion, in which she reviewed how Frijda had devoted his life to the study of emotions. In his magnum opus, the widely acclaimed book The emotions, Frijda (1986) presented a theory of emotion, starting from cognitive processing of the event or situation, and ending in expression and behaviour. Although appraisal preceded action readiness in this theory, Frijda (1993b) acknowledged the possibility that although appraisal constitutes the content of the emotion, it may not be its causal antecedent. Frijda’s enduring legacy also includes his widely cited laws of emotion (Frijda, 1988, 1992), an integrative theoretical statement of the main principles that govern emotional processing. Throughout his life and work, Frijda uniquely personified many of the qualities that have made Cognition & Emotion stand out as a scientific journal.

The new editorial team

Over the last three decades, Cognition & Emotion has developed into what it is today: A highly regarded scientific journal about people’s thoughts and feelings and how these two are mutually related. Cognition & Emotion has a distinctive profile, as a multidisciplinary journal that publishes theory-driven research with a rigorous empirical orientation. Since the beginning of 2017, we have sought to maintain the journal’s distinctive profile as the incoming Editors-in-Chief.

Our first order of business was to renew the Editorial Board of the journal. The Associate Editors are one of the most vital assets of the journal, given that they serve as action editors for most of its submissions. Of the previous team of Associate Editors, nine colleagues will leave the journal because of other pressing obligations. These are in alphabetical order: Yair Bar-Haim, Bishmadev Chakrabarti, Yulia Chentsova, Wilco van Dijk, Christine Larson, Kateri McRae, John Roberts, Carolien Rieffe, and Mark Rotteveel. On behalf of Cognition & Emotion, we thank these Associate Editors and the Editors-In-Chief, Agneta Fischer and Carien van Reekum, for their countless hours of hard work and commitment to excellence for the journal over the years.

The remaining Associate Editors of the previous editorial period agreed to continue their work for Cognition & Emotion. The years of experience that these Associate Editors bring to the table are important for ensuring that Cognition & Emotion continues to deliver the high quality that authors and readers are used to. The continuing Associate Editors are (again, in alphabetical order): Linda Camras, Nathan Consedine, Thomas Ehring, Ursula Hess, Ernst Koster, Peter Kuppens, Lauri Nummenmaa, Jonathan Rottenberg, Alexander Shackman, Deborah Talmi, and Eric Vanman. To make up for the outgoing Associate Editors, we further attracted seven excellent new people to join the team of Associate Editors: Tobias Brosch, Natalie Ebner, Andreas Eder, Daniёl Lakens, Susanne Scheibe, Susanne Schweizer, and Christian Waugh. These incoming Associate Editors add new fields of expertise to the journal, which allows us to handle a broader range of submissions in the field of cognition and emotion. On behalf of Cognition & Emotion, we welcome both our old and new Associate Editors to the editorial team.

Another important part of Cognition & Emotion is our Board of Advisors, which consists of experts who regularly serve as reviewers for the journal. In keeping with the nomenclature at other journals, we decided to rename the “Board of Advisors” into “Consulting Editors”. Of the previous team, the following colleagues will be leaving the journal: Amelia Aldao, Bruno Bara, Brock Bastian, Sam Cartwright, Meredith Coles, Jose Fernandes Dols, Manfred Holodynski, Hanjoo Lee, Anne Richards, Stephanie Rude, Mikko Sams, Bram Vervliet, Ineke Wessel, and Michelle Yik. On behalf of Cognition & Emotion, we thank these colleagues for many years of outstanding service.

Of the previous team, the following people will be staying on as Consulting Editors: Elaine Fox, Matt Garner, Ute Kunzmann, Warren Mansell, Andrew Mathews, Agnes Moors, Robin Nusslock, Brian Parkinson, Pierre Philippot, Adriaan Spruyt, Justin Storbeck, Renee Thompson, Lotte van Dillen, Ed Watkins, Blair Wisco, and Jenny Yiend. On behalf of Cognition & Emotion, we thank these colleagues for their past service and welcome them back to the journal.

To replace the outgoing members of the board, we also invited a number of new colleagues to join as Consulting Editors of Cognition & Emotion. The following colleagues agreed to work with us in this capacity: Georg Alpers, Phoebe Bailey, Chris Beevers, Annette Brose, Joshua Carlson, Elise Kalokerinos, Philipp Kanske, Peter Koval, Sandra Langeslag, Janek Lobmaier, Joe Mikels, Nilly Mor, Hadas Okon-Singer, Christine Purdon, Gal Sheppes, Mattie Tops, Henk van Steenbergen, Carmelo Vasquez, Andreas Voss, Thomas Webb, Dirk Wentura, Sherri Widen, and Matthias Wieser. On behalf of Cognition & Emotion, we welcome these new members of our Editorial Board.

Finally, we established a new part of the Editorial Board, namely, the Honorary Advisors of Cognition & Emotion. The Honorary Advisors consist of distinguished scholars who have provided outstanding service to the journal in the past. The latter will be occasionally called upon to advise us on matters that are of great strategic importance to the journal. For the time, the Honorary Advisors are mostly previous editors of the journal: Jan De Houwer, Agneta Fischer, Dirk Hermans, Keith Oatley, W. Gerrod Parrott, Craig Smith, Carolien van Reekum, Fraser Watts. In the future, we expect to invite additional Honorary Advisors.

Future prospects

Our new editorial team is ready to face the future developments and challenges of Cognition & Emotion. Undoubtedly, some of these challenges will be unforeseen. Nevertheless, we outline some of our plans for how we see the journal develop in the near future. Our overarching aim is to further establish Cognition & Emotion as a prime outlet for innovative and groundbreaking research on the interface of cognition and emotion, covering the entire research spectrum of the field.

In the coming years, we expect that Cognition & Emotion will continue to publish articles on the themes that have been prominent throughout the journal’s history, such as appraisal processes, basic emotions, biases in affective processing, and emotion regulation. We also expect and encourage authors to submit papers on age-related changes in emotions and affective processing across the entire life span, and to investigate the links between emotion, cognition, affective processing, and psychopathology. Notably, these areas are not meant to exclude other relevant research that addresses the relation between emotion and cognition. As already mentioned, Cognition & Emotion explicitly aims to cover the entire spectrum of research on the interface of cognition and emotion.

Citation impact of Cognition & Emotion

We want to make the journal as attractive as possible to potential authors. One important aspect of what makes a journal attractive is its impact factor. Over the years, the impact factor of Cognition & Emotion has been slowly but steadily increasing. According to the Journal Citation Reports InCites® index, the most recent impact factor of the journal is 2.688. This is the highest impact factor that Cognition & Emotion has ever had, and places the journal at the rank #148 within psychology (out of 664 listed journals). Because impact factors matter to authors, we seek to continue this upward trend in citation impact for Cognition & Emotion in the coming years. To increase the visibility of the articles that are published in the journal, we have now successfully agreed with representatives from Taylor & Francis that articles will be published as Advance Online publications shortly after acceptance, and are then immediately made available to the research community on the journal’s homepage and also in the major database of the field (PsycINFO).

Increasing the accessibility of “in press” articles before they are assigned to a specific issue in print will further improve the impact of the research that is published in our journal. Although Cognition & Emotion has a large coverage and numerous institutional subscriptions, we also recommend that authors decide to publish their articles as open access publications. Open access allows researchers from all over the world to access the content of these articles independent of institutional or personal subscriptions to the journal. Our publisher Taylor & Francis has already offered this option for several years, and we recommend that authors make use of this option to promote the wider dissemination of their work and hence its impact.

Ultimately, the most effective way for Cognition & Emotion to increase its citation impact is to entice authors to submit their best work to the journal, because better work attracts more citations. We aim to do this in two main ways. First, we want to make sure that authors receive fast, high-quality feedback. Second, we want to provide attractive publication formats to authors. In what follows, we further elaborate on these aspects.

Fast and high-guality feedback

Receiving high-quality and fast feedback on their work is of prime importance to authors. We are therefore committed to provide high quality and fast feedback to all manuscripts that have been submitted to the journal. To make this general goal more specific, we want to commit ourselves to the goal of providing all our authors with feedback on their manuscripts within two months after submission. Currently, average time until feedback after submission is around one month (34 days), including, however, around 40% immediate rejections. The recent acceptance rate for the journal is about 10%.

The above statistics indicate that we have already reached our goal of fast feedback for most submissions to Cognition & Emotion. Unfortunately, delays in the review process are sometimes inevitable. In such cases, we will seek communication with the authors and we will be very transparent with regard to the reasons that prevented us from sticking to the proposed timeline. We will also provide authors with relevant information regarding a back-up strategy and with a new deadline. We pledge to authors that we will care for all the work that is submitted to our journal, and that we feel fully responsible for providing authors with fast, thorough, and expert feedback. Authors should know that their best research is in good hands with us – we look forward to receiving the best and most innovative research on emotion and cognition from them.

Publication formats

In our projections, Cognition & Emotion will stay predominantly focused on publishing empirical articles, including both full articles and brief reports. At the same time, we want to continue the journal’s tradition of publishing theoretical papers and reviews. We also encourage authors to submit meta-analyses of findings that were gathered with certain paradigms or relating to effects that are relevant for emotion research. Furthermore, we acknowledge that special issues have played an important role in shaping the profile of Cognition & Emotion. We therefore want to revitalise the journal’s tradition of having at least one special issue per year. Moreover, following the lead of previous editors, we aim to write at least one editorial per year in which we report on matters relating to the journal and the field as a whole.

An important goal of our editorial term is to advance pre-registration of studies. As we already observed in our historical overview, promoting transparency and reproducibility have lately become key priorities for scientific research. Cognition & Emotion has already embraced this development by establishing a Registered Replication Reports (RRR) section. We want to further promote the use of pre-registration as a tool for confirmatory research and our aim is to make it more flexible and broader than it was before. For this purpose, we have changed the RRR section into a Registered Reports (RR) section, that is, authors can submit any form of research to the RR section, including close replications and conceptual replications, but also studies addressing new research questions or advancing new manipulations and paradigms. All of these forms of research are acceptable, as long as they adhere to the basic ground rules for pre-registered research. The RR section is thus no longer restricted to registered replication studies.

Daniël Lakens is an internationally renowned expert with regard to questions of reproducibility. He will therefore be the main Associate Editor for handling manuscripts that are submitted to the RR section of Cognition & Emotion. Manuscripts submitted under the RR section will undergo a two-stage review process: In Stage 1, the paper including the design of the planned research is examined by the editor and reviewers with regard to its theoretical and empirical importance, methodology (power, procedural stringency), and analytic procedures. If accepted in Stage 1, the authors will conduct the proposed study as it was described in the final accepted version of the Stage 1 manuscript. After this stage has been completed, the authors will report the study together with the results and the implications, and the final manuscript will be evaluated based on its adherence to the proposed research protocol that was evaluated in Stage 1 (independent of the actual results of the study).

Notably, it is also possible to submit manuscripts to the RR section that contain a mixture of studies that have been conducted and studies that are planned. For instance, in some cases, pilot studies might have produced interesting or provocative results, which, however, have to be substantiated by another study (e.g. with more power or with additional control conditions), which is developed and described in detail but has not yet been conducted. Because the RR section is new to the journal, we are open to suggestions from authors for ideas with regard to this section. Authors should therefore feel free to contact us or Daniël Lakens with questions or suggestions.

As a final note on publication formats, we would like to highlight an important distinction that was already in effect during the previous editorial period but has probably not been applied in full consequence. This is the distinction between Brief and Full Articles. Importantly, single study papers by default have to be submitted as Brief Articles (maximum word count 4,000 words, maximum 25 refs). Only in very rare cases do we allow a submission of single study papers that might exceed this limit (e.g. if the procedure and results are highly complex due to a mix of methods). By default, however, single study papers that are submitted as Full Articles are desk-rejected immediately after submission.

Consolidating methods in Cognition & Emotion research

We believe that strong and innovative research will make use of the opportunities that modern science is providing: In particular, we envisage a movement towards data-intensive research methods (e.g. experience sampling) that allow researchers to collect large amounts of relevant data in everyday contexts. Making use of these novel data collection tools for the assessment of cognition and emotion outside of the lab will provide new opportunities for studying cognition and emotion under natural conditions. The latter will foster our understanding of emotion and emotional functioning in normal populations as well as for people suffering from psychopathology.

Another methodological challenge will consist in furthering research on exploring and improving core research paradigms in cognition and emotion. Every empirical science is dependent on the paradigms it uses. Cognition and emotion research has reached the paradigmatic stage and has developed a number of research paradigms that yield robust and reliable effects (e.g. measures of attentional bias, evaluative priming, emotion regulation, evaluative conditioning). Still, some of these measures are not yet perfectly understood, so that more research on influencing factors and underlying processes is needed. For some important phenomena (e.g. spontaneous emotion regulation, affective flexibility), established research paradigms are not yet available or are in the process of being developed.

We will promote the consolidation of research paradigms in cognition and emotion research with several initiatives. We are working on one such initiative at the moment, which is to launch a new series of what we call parametric studies that aim at systematically investigating the influence of important parameters in several paradigms of emotion research. These studies comprise multi-lab studies, investigating the robustness of effects across laboratories, but also systematic comparisons of procedural details (manipulations, time parameters, designs), samples (focusing on different countries, cultural and ethnic differences, age groups, gender differences, lab vs. online samples), affect-evoking materials (pictures, words, sound clips), and interactions of these factors. The overarching aim of these dimensional studies will be to provide knowledge about the functioning and robustness of research paradigms across a wide range of conditions, and more insight into the relevant parameters that influence results in these paradigms, and of the mediating processes that explain these differences. A major challenge will be to define new standards for these parametric studies, for instance, with regard to issues of power, variability, and analysis (e.g. multilevel methodology). We intend to publish more details on this initiative later on, and we will advertise new initiatives along these lines on the website of the journal.

Coda

When thinking about the future, it is always good to know where one came from. It is with this common wisdom in mind that we decided to mark the beginning of our editorial term with a review of the past three decades in the history of Cognition and Emotion. Writing this review was a deeply enriching experience for us, and has filled us with a mixture of gratitude, humility, and pride. We feel gratitude for the groundbreaking work that generations of authors and editors have done before us. Indeed, it is through this work that we, along with other emotion researchers, are able to stand on the shoulders of giants. At the same time, this realisation is humbling, because our work would not be possible without the pioneers that came before us. In the final instance, however, we cannot help but to also feel a sense of pride that we, despite our limitations, can now be part of the venerable tradition of Cognition and Emotion, and, as its new editors, are able to serve in a field that addresses questions that go to the very heart of our humanity. We look forward to what the future will bring, and we invite everyone to join us in contributing to Cognition and Emotion in the years to come.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.