Abstract
It is with a sense of pride, enthusiasm and some trepidation that the new team officially takes over editorship of this journal for this issue. Emotion Review has been at the forefront of interdisciplinary thinking about emotion and stimulated many productive theoretical debates since the first issue appeared in 2009. It is a great honor to be granted the opportunity to advance and extend this project, building on the important work of our predecessors. We believe that our combined expertise in the sciences and humanities uniquely enables further extension of the journal’s disciplinary reach and brings exciting prospects for enhancing cross-disciplinary dialogue.
The combined expertise of our triumvirate provides an ideal opportunity to capitalize on Emotion Review’s strengths and to ensure that coverage of specialist topics remains accessible to readers coming from a wide range of knowledge bases. This is the first time that non-psychologists have served as editors-in-chief and that fact should send a message to potential authors across all of the domains of expertise that contribute to emotion theory and research. The humanities have been underrepresented in previous issues of this journal and we hope to correct this imbalance under our editorship.
Interdisciplinarity is often touted as a selling point of projects without clear plans for putting it into practice. Our knowledge of intersections between domains of scholarship will enable us to encourage genuine communication between disciplines. Where appropriate, we will encourage debate across the usual disciplinary boundaries by inviting commentaries from experts in neighboring areas. To achieve this, we will insist that our authors make their ideas accessible to educated readers who are unfamiliar with the jargon, linguistic tropes and presentational styles that characterize any subculture.
We also want to encourage submissions from authors at all career stages and from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible. To avoid any perception of bias, we have also recently introduced double-blind peer review as a default for all submissions to this journal. This brings us in line with common practice in philosophy and the humanities more broadly, as well as with many but not all journals in neuroscience, psychology and other social and human sciences, and allows our reviewers to avoid personalizing the ideas they are evaluating.
The papers included in this issue exemplify many of the strengths of our journal. The first paper sets out an interdisciplinary research agenda focusing on a novel contemporary phenomenon. The second suggests extending the limits of a well-understood effect beyond its usual context of operation. The third provides a new framework for understanding the collective nature of emotion. The fourth integrates theoretical perspectives on a specific emotion. The final paper offers an incisive commentary on a previously published article and serves to stimulate debate on an important conceptual issue.
We continue to encourage submissions that propose new theoretical approaches, provide novel integrations of existing knowledge, advance understanding of existing emotional phenomena or identify new topics for research. We are also happy to consider commentaries on papers published in this and other journals. This is in addition to the invited commentaries we will solicit on articles prior to publication.
Special Issues and Special Sections will also continue to be a key feature of our publication plans. Emotion Review has been highly successful in setting out the state of the art in current theoretical thinking and pointing the way forward throughout its history and we hope to extend this tradition by addressing emergent topics and revisiting recurrent ones. We welcome proposals for special issues from readers and members of the editorial board and are happy to support prospective editors in compiling them.
We are lucky to be taking on a journal that is in good shape and has an established reputation for setting the agenda in emotion theory. This success is due to the hard work and insightful leadership of an impressive succession of previous editors-in-chief, but we would particularly like to thank Jerry Parrott for his many contributions to the journal’s development. He has managed a challenging job in difficult times and we are very grateful.
To close, let us restate that we welcome rigorous and systematic theoretical contributions that bring conceptual clarity to a variety of topics—especially if they allow readers from different disciplines to appreciate the implications for their own research areas. Our overall aim is to encourage theoretically and empirically informed dialogue about issues that potentially benefit from a multidisciplinary perspective.