Four Years Into the Next Chapter at PSPR

Cultivating a Relational Editorial Culture

Assembling the senior editorial team was the first step in pursuing this theory of change. As the Editor and Associate Editors responsible for the stewardship of PSPR over the past 4 years, we came to this work aligned in our collective vision and invested in collaborating to pursue it. We immediately launched a relational editorial culture. The senior editorial team has met (on Zoom) every 6-to-8 weeks for the past 4 years. We begin these meetings by sharing a bit about our work lives (both PSPR-related and otherwise) and about our personal lives. During the past 4 years, members of the team have gotten married, moved houses, changed jobs, experienced the death of family members and beloved pets, parented sick kids and supported aging parents, taken on other leadership roles in our field and in our institutions, and weathered the innumerable more mundane ups and downs of daily life in our frantic and fractured world. Sharing these experiences with each other has laid a foundation for our collective work on the journal. We have truly operated as a team – which means we have not only enjoyed our alignments in goals, strategies, and tactics, but also engaged productively with each other around our disagreements. We have talked about our process a lot, ensuring we have nurtured a healthy editorial culture for ourselves.

Orienting the Editorial Board Toward Pathways to Editorial Leadership

Beyond the senior editorial team, we also sought to develop a broader editorial team that might contribute to the journal’s work and the journal’s culture. We decided to construe the Editorial Board as a central tool for cultivating pathways to editorial leadership. As the data presented in our mid-term report (Adler et al., 2024) demonstrate, our Editorial Board was quite different in its demographic and geographic composition from all prior Editorial Boards at the journal. Perhaps most notable were: the shift from being composed of almost 90% scholars who identify as White to less than 40% scholars who identify as White, the inclusion of many more scholars who work at non-doctoral degree-granting institutions, and the substantial increase in representation of scholars living and working in Majority World countries. Alongside this shift in the composition of the Editorial Board, we developed and implemented initiatives aimed at more deeply including scholars on the Editorial Board in the operation of the journal. For example, we hold an annual event (on Zoom, held twice during the same day to accommodate the wide range of time zones where our Board members live and work). This event is not only designed to telegraph information about the journal to the Board, but also to engage the Board members in shaping the priorities and direction of the journal and to foster connections between Board members.

This Editorial Board initiative has demonstrably impacted the journal. Perhaps the most straightforward quantitative metric of its impact can be seen in the acceptance rate of review requests sent to the Editorial Board. In prior terms, this acceptance rate was around 60%, according to data provided by the journal’s publisher, Sage. In the past 4 years, the acceptance rate for review requests to Editorial Board members has been around 90%. But beyond this quantitative metric, qualitative feedback received from Editorial Board members in response to our annual survey suggests additional impacts. Here are a few of the comments we have received over the past 4 years:

The mission and diverse, global perspective of PSPR is affecting my roles as AE for [two other leading journals]. For example, I’ve grown much more conscious about the limits of Western perspectives on theory and methods. PSPR should serve as a beacon to other journals (and editors, reviewers, etc.) for how to do things in a more inclusive way. I hope [other journals] will look a lot more like PSPR in the coming years.

Beyond the professional growth it has offered, this experience has strengthened my belief in the importance of collaboration and innovation in shaping the future of our field.

As a minority researcher who is not only gay, comes from Afghanistan, but also belongs to a religious minority and is a refugee to Europe, the path in academia hasn’t always been easy. Being included as part of the Editorial Board and seeing that the journal is genuinely interested in representing underrepresented populations has been a source of encouragement and motivation for me. Reflecting on my experience as an Editorial Board member, I have consistently valued a culture of respect in editorial work. Therefore, the four guiding qualities that define the editorial culture at PSPR (kind, constructive, generative, actionable) have had a profound impact on my role as a reviewer. They have not only influenced my approach to the review process but have also raised the standard of feedback I aim to offer to authors. These guiding qualities have played a pivotal role in enhancing the quality of my reviews and in fostering a more inclusive and respectful editorial culture. They have been instrumental in shaping my editorial approach.

Our sense is that the Editorial Board knows that their role is vital to the success of the journal and that they feel seen and appreciated for their service. While PSPR cannot take credit for their success, we have tracked their steps toward editorial leadership and celebrate their accomplishments in securing positions as Editors and Associate Editors at other journals across the field of personality and social psychology.

Developing an Emerging Editor Board

It quickly became apparent that our investment in cultivating pathways to editorial leadership needed to begin before scholars had already won the academic lottery of landing a tenure-track position. Within 2 months of beginning our term, we developed and launched an Emerging Editor Board, composed of advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are committed to the advancement of theory in personality and social psychology. Every manuscript that we advance to peer review is sent to a member of the Emerging Editor Board. Although those invitations explicitly encourage our Emerging Editors not to accept the review if they do not have the bandwidth to complete it, over 90% of our invitations are accepted, and the reviews are generally extremely strong and therefore instrumental in informing our editorial decisions. In response to every submitted review, Emerging Editors receive developmental feedback on their work from the Action Editor. The Emerging Editor Board initiative was designed with three goals in mind. First, fostering reviewing skills among future leaders in our field. Second, providing authors with the perspectives of emerging scholars who are often deeply immersed in the most recent scholarship in their subfield (though authors are not alerted to which review came from the Emerging Editor Board member). Third, supporting the journal’s peer review culture, ensuring timely and high-quality reviews for every manuscript. As the journal’s senior editorial team, we can attest to the success in reaching our second and third goals for the initiative. Qualitative feedback from Emerging Editors speaks to the success of the first goal. Here are just a few examples:

Reviewing for PSPR has truly helped me grow as a scholar. I have received training in reviewing empirical manuscripts in my graduate program and from my mentors, but reviewing theory papers is new and challenging. Pushing myself to think about what makes a strong and generative theory paper has helped me think more critically about my own work.

I am grateful for the opportunity to serve PSPR and review the excellent papers submitted to the journal. I greatly appreciated receiving feedback on my first PSPR review from [the Action Editor], which helped me improve my subsequent reviews for PSPR and other journals. I also value the editorial team’s efforts to build a sense of community. At last year’s SPSP conference, I had the chance to connect with several fellow Emerging Editors, and we had a wonderful time discussing research and exchanging career advice.

I feel that the PSPR journey has contributed a lot to my role as an author in these past two years. First of all, being a reviewer for PSPR and receiving developmental feedback has increased my confidence in my critical thinking. Sometimes I’ve been hesitant to say how I felt about a paper (mostly not being aligned with the authors’ views), but then, once done, I get to see the other reviewers’ replies (mostly senior scholars), and our ideas were often pretty much the same! It has been a nice feeling . . . The PSPR journey as an Emerging Editor has also definitely shaped the way I think about my own papers, and the next steps I want to follow in my career.

Our sense is that the Emerging Editor Board has exceeded our expectations in terms of its impact on the operations of the journal and the opportunity to engage with emerging scholars who will go on to lead our field. We strongly encourage other journals to adopt an Emerging Editor Board.

The Opportunity of the Editorial Fellowship

Across academic psychology, many journals have created Editorial Fellowship programs aimed at providing opportunities for scholars who might otherwise not have the opportunity to serve the field in this kind of role. When SPSP offered PSPR their inaugural Editorial Fellowship, the senior team sought to design it to have maximal impact toward our broader mission. Just as the reorientation of the Editorial Board yielded a powerful impact on the operation of the journal, we sought to develop an Editorial Fellowship that would serve as a pathway to editorial leadership. With humility about our ability to represent the breadth of personality and social psychology with one editorial team, we started with the question “which perspectives are least represented among the current PSPR team?” Our answer led us to develop the position aimed at recruiting scholars living and working in Majority World countries (non-Western societies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean), where most humans live (Kagitcibasi, 2002), but which are dramatically underrepresented in the personality and social psychology literature (Thalmayer et al., 2021).

Successful recruiting of Majority World scholars requires proactive outreach far beyond the typical channels of SPSP communications. We contacted more than 80 organizations and individual leaders in academic personality and social psychology around the world to recruit their help in amplifying our call for Editorial Fellowship applications. Scholars who have experienced marginalization from the systems and structures of dominant Western psychology may doubt the intentions of such outreach efforts, fear tokenization, or internally diminish their own likelihood of succeeding in such a role (Adjei, Mayisela, & Oppong, 2025), and recruitment efforts need to take the form of authentic and transparent invitations to succeed.

The Editorial Fellowship program has succeeded even beyond our initial hopes when we conceptualized the role. The journal’s three Editorial Fellows to date have come from different global regions (Ghana, Iran, and Brazil), were at different career stages when they began their work with us (Assistant, Associate/Lecturer, and Full Professor/Senior Lecturer ranks), and brought different disciplinary backgrounds. They each profoundly shaped the operation of the journal. Some of those impacts are publicly legible, such as the creation and oversight of our recent Special Issue, which we will describe in more detail below. But some of those impacts are most noticeable among the senior editorial team: contributing to our awareness of shortcomings in the journal’s operation, helping to clarify our policies and processes, and helping shape our internal celebrations of shared accomplishments.

And the three Editorial Fellows themselves have each leveraged the Fellowship to accelerate their pathway to leadership. Our 2023 Fellow, Stephen Baffour Adjei (Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development in Ghana), now serves as an Associate Editor at Psychological Science. Our 2024 Fellow, Pegah Nejat (Shahid Beheshti University in Iran), now serves on the Editorial Board of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and on SPSP’s Promoting Inclusive Excellence in Publications Committee. Our 2025 Fellow, Ligia Carolina Oliveira-Silva (Universidade Federal de Uberlândia in Brazil), is going to join the team of Associate Editors during the next editorial term at PSPR. Each of these scholars came to PSPR with the foundational preparation for the role – the Fellowship has not been focused on developing their scholarship – but inviting them to join the PSPR team helped surmount the systemic and structural barriers that impede full participation by many Majority World scholars in the Western journal system, including PSPR. We are thrilled that SPSP has committed to continuing the Editorial Fellowship program, and the incoming editorial team at PSPR is currently in the process of recruiting the next Fellow, also from Majority World regions.

Special Issue Titled “Highlighting Personality and Social Psychological Theories From Majority World Contexts”

At our February 2023 annual event for members of the Editorial Board and Emerging Editor Board, we convened a discussion about what the journal’s priorities ought to be for the second half of our term. The prevailing perspective was that our efforts to broaden global inclusion at the journal were successful in changing the composition of the journal’s editorial team, but that these efforts had not yet translated into additional inclusion of Majority World scholars in the manuscripts accepted for publication in the journal. Board members encouraged us to consider publishing a Special Issue that would address this goal.

The senior editorial team spent much time discussing the pros and cons of using a Special Issue as a strategy for amplifying Majority World scholarship. One of our primary concerns was that Special Issues risk compartmentalizing whatever research domain they promote, simultaneously guaranteeing its inclusion in the journal while potentially conveying that it is “special,” and therefore reifying the message that it is somehow different from what is typically published. We ultimately decided to proceed with the Special Issue only because our existing team brought the requisite expertise to appropriately contextualize the project. Editorial Fellow Dr. Adjei brought expertise in decolonial approaches to psychology. Editorial Fellow Dr. Nejat brought lived experience in navigating the Western journal system from a Majority World country, where access to Western scholarship is not always possible. Associate Editor Dr. Thalmayer brought experience as a Western scholar conducting research in Majority World contexts, seeking to blend etic and emic approaches.

The Special Issue was published as the November, 2025 issue of PSPR and opens with an introduction by the editorial team describing our process in detail (Adjei, Nejat, et al., 2025), so we will not discuss it further here. But we will comment on two aspects of the issue. First, unlike most PSPR manuscripts, the Special Issue did not require the generation of substantively new contributions to personality and social psychological theory. Instead, we sought to amplify theoretical approaches that might not have already permeated dominant Western scholarship. This issue was about highlighting a theory that has the potential to broadly impact the field. Second, as described in the introduction to the Special Issue, our hope is that this issue serves as a catalyst for broader inclusion of Majority World scholarship in Western journals, including PSPR. The Special Issue is not an endpoint on its own; it is an invitation for the field to seek out and include broader global representation within its ongoing publication practices.

In support of the Special Issue, PSPR’s publisher, Sage, took the highly unusual step of accepting our request to publish every contribution to the issue Free To Read, meaning scholars in any context will be able to access the issue without encountering a paywall. We hope this endorsement of the issue’s goals will amplify its impact.

Enhancing Authors’ Reflexivity and Transparency

In addition to the initiatives described above, we also implemented a set of five requirements authors need to adhere to in order for their manuscripts to be accepted for publication in PSPR. Ultimately, these requirements are aimed at enhancing authors’ reflexivity and transparency about their work.

First, authors are required to submit a Public Abstract, in addition to their Academic Abstract. While the advancement of theory does not typically receive the same kind of public attention as new empirical contributions do, we want to encourage every author to communicate about their work in broadly accessible ways. The Public Abstract prompts authors to consider how non-experts might understand their work, hopefully enhancing their ability to communicate about it. We attend closely to the Public Abstracts, ensuring they are not over-claiming the impact of the work represented in the manuscript, just describing it in accessible language.

Second, we have elevated PSPR to some of the highest standards for Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) of any journal in personality and social psychology (Levels 2 and 3 across TOP criteria). While the vast majority of manuscripts we accept at PSPR are purely theoretical, we have sought to ensure that any manuscript that does rely on quantitative approaches, such as meta-analysis, is as transparent and reproducible as possible. We see transparency and reflexivity as highly aligned values, as both encourage scholars to consider the ways in which readers will receive their work.

Third, authors are required to include a Constraints on Generality Statement in their manuscript, helping readers appropriately calibrate the generalizability of the ideas presented in the manuscript. This means asking authors to reflect on the specific conditions for which their manuscript’s claims ought to apply. In doing so, we hope to challenge assumptions that knowledge produced in one context is necessarily relevant to all contexts.

Fourth, authors are required to include a Citations Statement in their manuscript, reflecting on the breadth of the evidence base that informed their theory development. This encourages authors to assess the scope and potential biases of the literature that grounds their current work, based on the scope of their sources.

Fifth, authors are required to include a Positionality Statement in their manuscript, reflecting on the ways in which their own perspectives as authors have influenced the work they are presenting. These statements are not meant to be a simple declaration of the authors’ own demographic and geographic characteristics, but a transparent acknowledgment to readers of the ways in which the authors’ own perspectives have influenced the work they are presenting in the manuscript.

The inclusion of these additional requirements in every PSPR manuscript aims to acknowledge that all scholarship is conducted by individual teams of people who operate in specific contexts, and is aimed at readers who will receive the scholarship in a specific context. By requiring authors to articulate the contextual limits of their claims, reflect on the range of their sources, and acknowledge how their own positionalities shape their work, we invite greater epistemic humility and accountability, contributing to decolonizing knowledge production.

Leadership by the Editor (Written by the Associate Editors and Editorial Fellow)

In the view of the senior editorial team, the success of our efforts has relied on Dr. Adler’s leadership as Editor. In this role, Dr. Adler’s impact has been transformative, as he has consistently leaned into the possibility of change, rather than simply settling into the status quo. Dr. Adler has combined intellectual rigor with a high level of relational sensitivity, investing time in advocating for new initiatives, mentoring colleagues, providing detailed and thoughtful feedback to authors and team members, and publicly elevating the contributions and achievements of the editorial community and PSPR authors. Through this blend of care and courage, Dr. Adler has been able to maintain PSPR’s scholarly excellence while expanding its role as a catalyst for change in psychological science. While we have very much operated as a coordinated team, we believe that Dr. Adler’s leadership created space for new voices and perspectives that will continue to influence the field for years to come.

Looking Ahead

SPSP has selected current PSPR Associate Editor Dr. Eranda Jayawickreme to be the next Editor of the journal. As part of the team responsible for developing and implementing the initiatives listed above, Dr. Jayawickreme is committed to maintaining them into the next term, while pursuing additional priorities. The current senior editorial team (which includes Dr. Jayawickreme) has been discussing how to best assess the impact of our initiatives. In our mid-term report on the journal (Adler et al., 2024), we provided a peer-reviewed quantitative assessment of the demographic and geographic composition of the journal’s broad editorial team, compared to the editorial teams across the journal’s history. We believe it is premature to quantitatively assess the impact of our other initiatives in other ways. As noted in our incoming editorial (Adler, 2022), we have prioritized quality over speed in every aspect of running the journal. Yet we remain committed to formally assessing the impact of our initiatives and will collaborate with the incoming senior editorial team to do so in the coming years.

Concluding Thoughts

The opportunity to shepherd PSPR and to serve the personality and social psychology community has been a career highlight for each of us. We find ourselves profoundly inspired by the quality of the scholarship we have received and by the enthusiasm and dedication of our broad team of colleagues overseeing the journal. We are even more deeply committed to the collective work of our field now than when we began our service to the journal.

While maintaining the exceedingly high quality of scholarship published in the journal has always been our top priority, we have been particularly fulfilled by the opportunity to serve as change agents within personality and social psychology. In addition to serving as repositories for the core work in the field, journals also serve to maintain and shape the culture of the field. We have felt especially well-positioned (and especially well-supported by SPSP) in our efforts to impact the culture of the field. PSPR’s small scale, relative to the other SPSP journals, has provided the ideal conditions for innovation. We have spent the past 4 years trying things, seeing how they work, and refining our efforts. Now, as our term concludes, we believe that we have developed important and impactful initiatives that will continue to sustain the journal’s impact, going forward.

But, for culture change to be successful, it is incumbent on other journals to adopt some of our initiatives. We know that the unique ecosystems within each journal mean that our interventions cannot simply be transplanted without modification. But we hope all journals’ editorial teams will be aware of their role in maintaining and shaping the culture of the field and to embrace that aspect of their work while overseeing the journal’s daily operations.

At the conclusion of our term, we want to express gratitude to the broad community in personality and social psychology, and within SPSP in particular, for supporting our efforts to use the gift of this editorial term to innovate. Having the opportunity to engage with so many people from around the world who are committed to the field of personality and social psychology has been inspiring. We look forward to the work still to come.