Editor Spotlight

Dr. Shinobu Kitayama is the Social Psychology Area Chair and Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?

I am a social psychologist, with a long-term research interest in cultural variation in psychological processes including cognition, emotion, and motivation as well as in the self that is constituted by these processes.

I have had extensive journal editing experiences. I was Editor-in-Chief at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2007–2012).

More recently, I have been an associate editor at the second section (Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP).

Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

The top priority of our editorial team is the scientific rigor of the papers we publish in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (JPSP-ASC).

In addition, we will encourage methodological innovations, while also fostering greater awareness of the diversity in subject populations (or the absence thereof) to address the generality of findings.

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now? What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field?

Throughout my career, I've always thought about social and personality psychology as a nexus point for some of the most exciting and expansive ideas in psychology.

From its inception in the early 20th century, the field has examined how the social world shapes psychological processes. I would argue that the idea that the mind is exquisitely tuned to our social contexts is an insight we should be proud of. It is also the one that is relevant not only to those of us who identify as "social-personality psychologists," but to society at large as well.

It is my view that social personality psychology has the potential to advance our understanding of some of the most pernicious challenges that we face.

Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Are you making any changes?

I am planning to make the following four changes:

1. Authors must provide a broad discussion on how they sought to maximize power. This discussion should include, but not be limited to sample size. It may refer, for example, to improvement of measures, manipulation checks, and treatment of stimuli as a random factor. Authors are encouraged to submit an online supplementary document that includes materials, as discussed above, that are crucial in guaranteeing the fidelity of the study as executed.
2. Authors must also provide a thoughtful discussion on their samples with an emphasis on their diversity and inclusiveness, or the absence thereof. This discussion must include the generality assumed for a key finding(s) under discussion, as well as possible limits thereof.
3. There must be a thoughtful discussion of how the reported study or set of studies contributes to cumulative theoretical knowledge in psychology. This discussion may involve, but needs not to be limited to an explication of how the study (or studies) builds on and extends, or challenges, commonly accepted theoretical frameworks in our field.
4. We strongly welcome theory-driven papers that utilize novel methods and single study manuscripts, as long as they make important theoretical contributions to social psychology with innovative methods, and the study is sufficiently powered. These papers may be processed under a new category of "Innovations in Social Psychology" and are likely to be much shorter than papers traditionally published in JPSP. These papers may be handled in an expedited fashion.

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