Psychology of Popular Media

Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.

Submission

To submit to the Editorial Office of Karen Shackleford, PhD., please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word (.docx) or LaTex (.tex) as a zip file with an accompanied Portable Document Format (.pdf) of the manuscript file.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7^th edition. Manuscripts may be copyedited for bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7^th edition are available.

Submit Manuscript

Karen Shackleford, PhD
Fielding Graduate University
Email

Do not submit manuscripts to the Editor's email address.

In addition to addresses and phone numbers, please supply email addresses and fax numbers for use by the editorial office and later by the production office.

Masked review

Masked review is the default for this journal. Include authors' names and affiliations only in the cover letter for the manuscript. Authors should make every effort to see that the manuscript itself contains no clues to their identities.

Note also that repositories may offer anonymized links to data, materials, code, or preregistrations (e.g., Create a View-only Link for a Project).

If your manuscript was mask reviewed, please ensure that the final version for production includes a byline and full author note for typesetting.

Author contribution statements using CRediT

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.), which stipulates that “authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study.” In the spirit of transparency and openness, Psychology of Popular Media has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to a manuscript.

Submitting authors are encouraged to identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to the CRediT taxonomy. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the CRediT designations will be published as an author contributions statement in the author note of the final article. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before submission.

CRediT includes 14 contributor roles, as described below:

• Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• Data curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
• Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
• Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
• Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
• Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
• Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
• Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
• Writing—original draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing—review and editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision: including pre- or post-publication stages.

Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author. Not all roles will be applicable to any particular scholarly work.

Manuscript preparation

Review APA's Journal Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submitting your article.

Full-length articles

Manuscripts must be no longer than 30 pages, inclusive of everything (e.g., references, figures, tables, title page, and appendices). Authors can include unlimited supplemental materials to be posted electronically.

Double-space all copy.

Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Additional guidance on APA Style is available on the APA Style website.

Brief reports

Authors may choose to submit their work in the form of a Brief Report. Brief Reports can be an ideal format for: research studies of high methodological rigor that can be reported very effectively in a brief format; research showcasing high interest findings succinctly; sound investigations of a preliminary nature on high-interest topics; well-conducted replication studies, regardless of outcome; brief theoretical pieces or literature reviews that advance the field.

Authors choosing this option should indicate in their cover letter that they wish their submission to be considered as a Brief Report and that they agree not to submit a longer report of the same research to another journal. Brief Reports should be 15 pages double spaced inclusive of references, figures and tables, but exclusive of title page. As with regular submissions, authors are encouraged to place additional details in a Supplemental Materials section.

Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS)

Authors are required to follow the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research. Updated in 2018, the standards offer ways to improve transparency in reporting to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of the research and to facilitate collaboration and replication. The new JARS:

• Recommend the division of hypotheses, analyses and conclusions into primary, secondary and exploratory groupings to allow for a full understanding of quantitative analyses presented in a manuscript and to enhance reproducibility;
• Offer modules for authors reporting on N-of-1 designs, replications, clinical trials, longitudinal studies and observational studies, as well as the analytic methods of structural equation modeling and Bayesian analysis;
• Include guidelines on reporting on registration (including making protocols public); participant characteristics, including demographic characteristics; inclusion and exclusion criteria; psychometric characteristics of outcome measures and other variables; and planned data diagnostics and analytic strategy.

Openness and transparency

Authors should state all sources of financial support for the conduct of the research (e.g., This research was supported by Award XX from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in the author note. If the funding source was involved in any other aspects of the research (e.g., study design, analysis, interpretation, writing), then clearly state the role. If the funding source had no other involvement other than financial support, then simply state that the funding source had no other role other than financial support.

Authors should also provide a conflict of interest statement in the author note disclosing any real or potentially perceived conflict(s) of interest, including financial, personal, or other relationships with other organizations or companies that may inappropriately impact or influence the research and interpretation of the findings. If there are no conflicts of interest, this should be clearly stated.

Authors should provide a data availability statement indicating whether the data, methods used in the analysis, code, and materials used to conduct the research will be made available to any researcher for purposes of reproducing the results or replicating the procedure. In both the author note and at the end of the method section, either specify where that material will be available or note the ethical or legal reasons for not doing so.

Preregistration of studies and analysis plans can be useful for distinguishing confirmatory and exploratory analyses. We encourage investigators to preregister their studies and analysis plans prior to conducting the research (e.g., Open Science Framework, ClinicalTrials.gov). If any aspect of the study is preregistered, include the registry link in the Author Note.

Authors who have posted their manuscripts to preprint archives, such as PsyArXiv, prior to submission should include a link to the preprint in the author note.

Research disclosures

The Method section of each empirical report must contain a detailed description of the study participants, including age, sex and race/ethnicity and other demographics pertinent to the subject of study.

In the Discussion section of the manuscript, authors should discuss the diversity of their study samples.

The Method section also must include a statement describing how informed consent was obtained from the participants (or their parents/guardians), including for secondary use of data if applicable, and indicate that the study was conducted in compliance with an appropriate Internal Review Board.

Replications

In addition to full-length research papers reporting novel findings, the journal publishes replications, giving equal consideration to replications with null results. Preregistration of replication studies is strongly recommended, but not required (see examples of preregistrations on the Open Science Framework, ClinicalTrials.gov, AsPredicted, and the WHO Registry Network, among others).

Display equations

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

• Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.
• Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Computer code

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.

In Online Supplemental Material

We request that runnable source code be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit Supplementing Your Article With Online Material.

In the Text of the Article

If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Tables

Use Word's Insert Table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.

Public policy relevance statements

Authors submitting manuscripts to Psychology of Popular Media are required to provide 2–3 brief sentences regarding the public significance statements of the study or meta-analysis described in their paper. This description should be included within the manuscript on the abstract/keywords page. It should be written in language that is easily understood by both professionals and members of the lay public.

When an accepted paper is published, these sentences will be boxed beneath the abstract for easy accessibility. All such descriptions will also be published as part of the Table of Contents, as well as on the journal's web page. This new policy is in keeping with efforts to increase dissemination and usage by larger and diverse audiences.

Examples of these 2–3 sentences include the following:

• "A brief cognitive–behavioral intervention for caregivers of children undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplant reduced caregiver distress during the transplant hospitalization. Long-term effects on caregiver distress were found for more anxious caregivers as well as caregivers of children who developed graft-versus-host disease after the transplant."
• "Inhibitory processes, particularly related to temporal attention, may play a critical role in response to exposure therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The main finding that individuals with PTSD who made more clinical improvement showed faster improvement in inhibition over the course of exposure therapy supports the utility of novel therapeutic interventions that specifically target attentional inhibition and better patient-treatment matching."
• "When children participated in the enriched preschool program Head Start REDI, they were more likely to follow optimal developmental trajectories of social– emotional functioning through third grade. Ensuring that all children living in poverty have access to high-quality preschool may be one of the more effective means of reducing disparities in school readiness and increasing the likelihood of lifelong success."

To be maximally useful, these statements of public significance should not simply be sentences lifted directly from the manuscript.

They are meant to be informative and useful to any reader. They should provide a bottom-line, take-home message that is accurate and easily understood. In addition, they should be able to be translated into media-appropriate statements for use in press releases and on social media.

Prior to final acceptance and publication, all public significance statements will be carefully reviewed to make sure they meet these standards. Authors will be expected to revise statements as necessary.

Please refer to Guidance for Translational Abstracts and Public Significance Statements to help you write this text.

Academic writing and English language editing services

Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors.

Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service.

Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.

Submitting supplemental materials

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the APA PsycArticles^® database. Please see Supplementing Your Article With Online Material for more details.

Abstract and keywords

All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases.

References

List references in alphabetical order. Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed in the References section.

Examples of basic reference formats:

Journal Article

McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review, 126(1), 1–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126

Authored book

Brown, L. S. (2018). Feminist therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000092-000

Chapter in an edited book

Balsam, K. F., Martell, C. R., Jones. K. P., & Safren, S. A. (2019). Affirmative cognitive behavior therapy with sexual and gender minority people. In G. Y. Iwamasa & P. A. Hays (Eds.), Culturally responsive cognitive behavior therapy: Practice and supervision (2nd ed., pp. 287–314). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000119-012

All data, program code and other methods must be appropriately cited in the text and listed in the reference section. 

• Data Set Citation:
  Alegria, M., Jackson, J. S., Kessler, R. C., & Takeuchi, D. (2016). Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), 2001–2003 [Data set]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20240.v8

Figures

Preferred formats for graphics files are TIFF and JPG, and preferred format for vector-based files is EPS. Graphics downloaded or saved from web pages are not acceptable for publication. Multipanel figures (i.e., figures with parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.) should be assembled into one file. When possible, please place symbol legends below the figure instead of to the side.

Resolution

• All color line art and halftones: 300 DPI
• Black and white line tone and gray halftone images: 600 DPI

Line weights

• Adobe Photoshop images
  • Color (RGB, CMYK) images: 2 pixels
  • Grayscale images: 4 pixels
• Adobe Illustrator Images
  • Stroke weight: 0.5 points

APA offers authors the option to publish their figures online in color without the costs associated with print publication of color figures.

The same caption will appear on both the online (color) and print (black and white) versions. To ensure that the figure can be understood in both formats, authors should add alternative wording (e.g., “the red (dark gray) bars represent”) as needed.

For authors who prefer their figures to be published in color both in print and online, original color figures can be printed in color at the editor's and publisher's discretion provided the author agrees to pay:

• $900 for one figure
• An additional $600 for the second figure
• An additional $450 for each subsequent figure

Permissions

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

• Download Permissions Alert Form (PDF, 13KB)

Open science badges

Starting in August 2017, articles are eligible for open science badges recognizing publicly available data, materials, and/or preregistration plans and analyses. These badges are awarded on a self-disclosure basis.

At submission, authors must confirm that criteria have been fulfilled in a signed badge disclosure form (PDF, 33KB) that must be submitted as supplemental material. If all criteria are met as confirmed by the editor, the form will then be published with the article as supplemental material.

Authors should also note their eligibility for the badge(s) in the cover letter.

For all badges, items must be made available on an open-access repository with a persistent identifier in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent. For the preregistered badge, this is an institutional registration system.

Data and materials must be made available under an open license allowing others to copy, share, and use the data, with attribution and copyright as applicable.

Available badges are:

Open Data:
All data necessary to reproduce the reported results that are digitally shareable are made publicly available. Information necessary for replication (e.g., codebooks or metadata) must be included.

Open Data: Protected Access:
A "PA" (Protected Access) notation may be added to open data badges if sensitive, personal data are available only from an approved third-party repository that manages access to data to qualified researchers through a documented process. To be eligible for an open data badge with such a notation, the repository must publicly describe the steps necessary to obtain the data and detailed data documentation (e.g. variable names and allowed values) must be made available publicly.

Open Materials:
All materials necessary to reproduce the reported results that are digitally shareable, along with descriptions of non-digital materials necessary for replication, are made publicly available.

Preregistered:
At least one study's design has been preregistered with descriptions of (a) the research design and study materials, including the planned sample size; (b) the motivating research question or hypothesis; (c) the outcome variable(s); and (d) the predictor variables, including controls, covariates, and independent variables. Results must be fully disclosed. As long as they are distinguished from other results in the article, results from analyses that were not preregistered may be reported in the article.

Preregistered+Analysis Plan:
At least one study's design has been preregistered along with an analysis plan for the research — and results are recorded according to that plan.

Note that it may not be possible to preregister a study or to share data and materials. Applying for open science badges is optional.

Publication policies

APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications.

See also APA Journals^® Internet Posting Guidelines.

APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).

• Download Full Disclosure of Interests Form (PDF, 41KB)

Ethical Principles

It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish "as original data, data that have been previously published" (Standard 8.13).

In addition, APA Ethical Principles specify that "after research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release" (Standard 8.14).

APA expects authors to adhere to these standards. Specifically, APA expects authors to have their data available throughout the editorial review process and for at least 5 years after the date of publication.

Authors are required to state in writing that they have complied with APA ethical standards in the treatment of their sample, human or animal, or to describe the details of treatment.

• Download Certification of Compliance With APA Ethical Principles Form (PDF, 26KB)

The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on its website in HTML, PDF, and Word format. You may also request a copy by emailing or calling the APA Ethics Office (202-336-5930). You may also read "Ethical Principles," December 1992, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, pp. 1597–1611.

Other information

See APA’s Publishing Policies page for more information on publication policies, including information on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors, author name changes after publication, the use of generative artificial intelligence, funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures, duplicate publication, data publication and reuse, and preprints.

Visit the Journals Publishing Resource Center for more resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing in APA journals.

Editor

Karen Shackleford, PhD
Fielding Graduate University, United States

Associate editors

Allison Eden, PhD
Michigan State University, United States

Andreas Miles-Novelo, PhD
Fielding Graduate University, United States

Nancy Rhodes, PhD
Michigan State University, United States

Gayle S. Stever, PhD
Empire State University of New York, United States

Patrick James Sweeney, MPhil, PhD
Fielding Graduate University, United States

Megan A. Vendemia, PhD
West Virginia University, United States

Founding editors

Joanne Broder, PhD
Saint Joseph's University, United States

James C. Kaufman, PhD
University of Connecticut, United States

Consulting editors

Cassandra Alexopoulos, PhD
University of Massachusetts Boston, United States

Craig A. Anderson, PhD
Iowa State University, United States

Anita Atwell Seate, PhD
University of Maryland, United States

Joshua Baldwin, PhD
University of Georgia, United States

Omotayo Banjo, PhD
University of Cincinnati, United States

Anne Bartsch, PhD
University of Leipzig, Germany

Denise D. Bielby, PhD
University of California, Santa Barbara, United States

Fran Blumberg, PhD
Fordham University, United States

Bradley J. Bond, PhD
University of San Diego, United States

Nicholas D. Bowman, PhD
West Virginia University, United States

Johannes Breuer, PhD
GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany

Brad J. Bushman, PhD
The Ohio State University, United States

Sharon Coen, PhD
University of Salford, United Kingdom

J. David Cohen, MSc
Empire State University, United States

Sarah M. Coyne, PhD
Brigham Young University, United States

Sonya Dal Cin, PhD
University of Michigan, United States

Grant J. Devilly, BSc(Hons), MClinPsych, PhD
Griffith University, Australia

Jayson L. Dibble, PhD
Hope College, United States

Arienne Ferchaud, PhD
Florida State University, United States

Lance C. Garmon, PhD
Salisbury University, United States

Douglas A. Gentile, PhD
Iowa State University, United States

David Giles, PhD
University of Winchester, United Kingdom

Melanie C. Green, PhD
University at Buffalo (SUNY), United States

Matthew Grizzard, PhD
The Ohio State University, United States

Karla R. Hamlen Mansour, PhD
Cleveland State University, United States

James D. Ivory, PhD
Virginia Tech, United States

Benjamin K. Johnson, PhD
University of Florida, United States

Elly A. Konijn, PhD
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Raymond A. Mar, PhD
York University, Canada

Brandon Miller, PhD
University of Massachusetts Boston, United States

Keith Oatley, PhD
University of Toronto, Canada

Art Raney, PhD
Florida State University, United States

Meghan S. Sanders, PhD
Louisiana State University, United States

Angeline Sangalang, PhD
University of Dayton, United States

Erica Scharrer, PhD
University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States

Bharath Sriraman, PhD
The University of Montana - Missoula, United States

Laramie D. Taylor, PhD
University of California, Davis, United States

Riva Tukachinsky, PhD
Chapman University, United States

Sonya Utz, PhD
Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien Tübingen (Knowledge Media Research Center); University of Tübingen, Germany

David Westerman, PhD
North Dakota State University, United States

Abstracting and indexing services providing coverage of Psychology of Popular Media^®

• OCLC
• PsycInfo
• Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)

• “This Is (Not) Fine”:

  Special issue of the APA journal Psychology of Popular Media, Vol. 11, No. 3, July 2022. The articles shed light on the role of entertainment media in emotional regulation processes, psychological need fulfillment, social connection, diversion, parenting, and even activism.

• Video Games and Youth:

  Special issue of the APA journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Vol. 4, No. 4, October 2015. Includes articles about violent, sports, and fantasy games; daily game playing and learning strategies; and parenting style influences.

• Gender Stereotypes in the Media:

  Special issue of the APA journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 2015. Includes articles about female stereotypes in TV, movies, video games, and music.

Inclusive reporting standards

• Bias-free language and community-driven language guidelines (required)
• Data sharing and data availability statements (required)
• Impact statements (required)

Definitions and further details on inclusive study designs are available on the Journals EDI homepage.

Inclusive reporting standards

• Author contribution roles using CRediT (required)

More information on this journal’s reporting standards is listed under the submission guidelines tab.

Other EDI offerings

ORCID reviewer recognition

Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) Reviewer Recognition provides a visible and verifiable way for journals to publicly credit reviewers without compromising the confidentiality of the peer-review process. This journal has implemented the ORCID Reviewer Recognition feature in Editorial Manager, meaning that reviewers can be recognized for their contributions to the peer-review process.

Masked peer review

This journal offers masked peer review (where both the authors’ and reviewers’ identities are not known to the other). Research has shown that masked peer review can help reduce implicit bias against traditionally female names or early-career scientists with smaller publication records (Budden et al., 2008; Darling, 2015).

Announcements

• Virtual Media Psychology Symposium 2020 | Popular Media’s Role in a World on Fire: Panel Discussion with the Editors of the APA Journal Psychology of Popular Media
• Call for editor nominations
• New editor appointed

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Editor Spotlight

• Read an interview with Editor Karen Dill-Shackleford, PhD