Melanie Takarangi, PhD

Takarangi is a professor of psychology at Flinders University and a member of the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Briefly describe your background. What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?

I became interested in understanding human behavior at an early age and began studying psychology in my final year of high school. I completed my undergraduate and graduate training in cognitive psychology at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand, working with Maryanne Garry and Devon Polaschek. Although my work then focused on false memories, I wrote my dissertation on the cognitive processes underlying aggressive and violent behavior.

My current research focuses on understanding how people anticipate and remember negative or traumatic personal experiences. For example, I have investigated how people remember or misremember the details and emotions of traumatic events, and ways to reduce harm among online content moderators who make decisions about whether certain, typically negative, content is allowed to remain online (e.g., on social media platforms). This work happens within an active, close-knit research lab grounded in a scientific culture of apprenticeship. Advising and mentoring students and early‑career researchers is my favorite part of the job!

I have regularly reviewed manuscripts for more than 40 journals, typically in memory, cognition, and emotion across applied, forensic, and clinical settings. I joined the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (JARMAC) as an associate editor in January 2022, co‑edited a special issue on autobiographical processing and psychopathology in 2025, and then became editor.

Briefly, what are your main priorities? How will you grow readership? What type of scholarship will you promote in the journal? What kind of content are you hoping to attract?

As editor, I look forward to working with the scientific community—our authors, reviewers, and associate editors—to guide JARMAC on the next steps in its proud history. Like my predecessors, I am committed to ensuring the memory and cognitive science we publish is thoughtful, rigorous, transparent, and consequential. I will encourage and support scholarship that is theoretically grounded, methodologically sound, and speaks clearly to questions that matter beyond the laboratory. I will also seek opportunities that help the journal bring its work to new audiences and welcome new authors to its pages. Available data show that well-cited JARMAC articles tend to focus on topics such as misinformation and belief formation; learning, teaching, and testing; decision-making; and eyewitness memory. These areas remain important, but I also would like to see more submissions on false memory, autobiographical memory, emotional memory, and other psychology and law topics. I also see opportunities to feature work on cognitive processes in psychopathology, human factors, occupational and workplace psychology, cognitive aging, and decision-making in health and medical contexts.

What challenges lie ahead for the field and the journal? What issues are important to address more broadly?

Open science practices are an ongoing challenge, and journals help set the field’s shared expectations about what counts as good evidence, responsible inference, and trustworthy science. Pre-registration is now a well-established practice, as is sharing materials, data, and code so others can evaluate published work and build on or try to replicate it. Therefore, manuscripts with deviations from these practices will require a strong justification at the time of submission. The journal also welcomes replication studies and null results that advance theory and offer meaningful, real-world implications.

Another challenge relates to participation in science and scholarly publishing for colleagues who do not write in English as their first language. These colleagues face issues with the time it takes to read a paper and to write a manuscript, along with the possibility of being rejected on written-expression or language grounds. More broadly, many researchers do not have the resources they need—funding, subject pools, statistical expertise, or time—to turn their interesting ideas into publications. Addressing these disparities is important if the field is to benefit from a genuinely international research community.

Finally, generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents important challenges to data integrity in studies conducted online and for journals’ responsibility to maintain trust in the scientific record. Thus, JARMAC authors are now required to report dates of data collection and describe procedures used to support data integrity (e.g., checks on attention, inactivity, or AI use).

APA Journals is committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in its practices and systems. How will this be reflected in the journal?

We should pay close attention to who participates in the publication process. Who are our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members? What intellectual, cultural, ideological, and political perspectives are represented in what we publish? Diversity in all its forms helps good science happen, encompassing the richness of thought that emerges from interdisciplinary collaboration and considering varied ideas. The 2026 editorial board includes members from 10 countries, spans career stages and areas of expertise, and reflects a commitment to broad participation in journal activities. I also am committed to bringing students and early-career researchers more deliberately into reviewing and editorial work. These activities are not simply service but also are training, mentoring, and relationship-building. Structured co-reviewing and a newly announced editorial fellowship program aim to broaden participation in the journal while developing future reviewers and editors. Other approaches include encouraging inclusive citation practices and inviting target articles from scholars and areas of work currently underrepresented in the journal.

Explore APA Journals’ EDI initiatives.

Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Have you introduced or are you planning to introduce any changes?

Since its inception, one of JARMAC’s distinctive features has been its high‑profile target articles, which allow readers to engage with timely and provocative issues that are relevant beyond academia. Several new target articles are currently in development, and I am excited to see these articles take shape.

Our team of associate editors is excellent, and most of our current editorial processes work well. These processes include making early editorial decisions (“desk rejections”); providing prompt, helpful feedback and clear editorial guidance to authors; and respecting the time reviewers contribute. Where appropriate, we actively encourage resubmission. Prospective authors are also welcome to email me with an abstract if they are unsure about article fit.

I have recently updated the JARMAC submission guidelines and encourage new and returning authors to review them carefully. To better align JARMAC with APA’s Journal Article Reporting Standards, the guidelines now provide clearer direction on reporting participant characteristics, sampling procedures, sample size decisions, open science practices, and constraints on generality. Authors should explicitly discuss the populations, materials, and conditions to which their findings could reasonably apply, as well as any limits on generalization.