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 and will need to be resubmitted.

To submit to the editorial office of Melody Wiseheart, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word or Open Office format.

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

Submit Manuscript

Authors must obtain a user ID and password upon the first submission. Instructions and support for the submission process are available on the site.

All parts of the manuscript must be available in an electronic format (generic rich text format or Microsoft Word; PDF files are not permitted).

Authors with questions concerning manuscript submission should address these directly to the editorial office.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied is now using a software system to screen submitted content for similarity with other published content. The system compares the initial version of each submitted manuscript against a database of 40+ million scholarly documents, as well as content appearing on the open web. This allows APA to check submissions for potential overlap with material previously published in scholarly journals (e.g., lifted or republished material).

Each issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied will honor one manuscript as the Editor’s Choice.

The Editor’s Choice article will be selected based on an assessment of the following criteria. In addition to the editor’s own assessment of these criteria, information provided in the peer reviews (numerical ratings and comments) and the AEs’ decision letters will be used as data for selection.

When the editor prepares the table of contents each quarter, the editor will identify the article that they believe best meets the criteria in consultation with the AEs.    

Content

The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied publishes original empirical investigations in experimental psychology that bridge practical problems and psychological theory.

Review articles may be considered for publication if they contribute significantly to important topics within applied experimental psychology, the primary focus is on original experimental investigations conducted in laboratory or field settings.

While articles on applied questions in perception, memory, decision making, learning, attention, and human performance have traditionally been more prevalent, research from any area of applied experimental psychology is very much welcomed and may include investigations from fields as diverse as abnormal, cognitive, consumer, developmental, educational, forensic, health, human factors, social, organizational, or sport psychology.

Articles may range from reports of multiple experiments to briefer reports of single studies, but they should report methodologically and statistically robust results and offer theoretical and applied insights.

The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied encourages and publishes direct replications and registered reports. Replication submissions should include “A Replication of XX Study” in the subtitle of the manuscript as well as in the abstract. Authors are encouraged to pre-register replication studies.

Registered Reports require a two-step review process.

The first step is the submission of the registration manuscript. This is a partial manuscript that includes hypotheses, rationale for the study, experimental design, and methods. The partial manuscript will be reviewed for significance and methodological approach.

If the partial manuscript is accepted, this amounts to provisional acceptance of the full report regardless of the outcome of the study. The full manuscript will be reviewed for adherence to the preregistered design.

Researchers in some applied experimental fields present their research at conferences that are accompanied by full proceedings or perhaps result in technical reports. Is it appropriate to submit data or text material that have been published previously in one of these outlets to JEP: Applied for consideration?

Generally there is no concern if the paper has only been published in abstracted form or in a publication with limited circulation or availability (e.g., a laboratory report). However, if the publication was publicly available (e.g., conference proceedings or book chapters) then concerns about duplicate publication arise (APA, 2010, pp. 13–15).

The policy of APA is that duplicate publication should be avoided. If this is potentially an issue the author should carefully read the above section of the Publication Manual before deciding whether it is appropriate to submit the manuscript.

The editor will observe the following policy:

At manuscript submission, all authors are asked if any portions of the data or manuscript have been previously published. If so, they must provide

The editor will then decide whether the submission meets the standard of being substantially novel.

Authors must specifically acknowledge in their JEP: Applied paper that portions of the data have been previously published and provide the complete reference. Authors must also make clear which data have been previously published so as to enable subsequent researchers doing a meta-analysis, for example, to differentiate data sets as appropriate.

Authors have the opportunity to suggest reviewers for their submitted manuscripts as well as to identify reviewers they oppose. Suggested reviewers should have expertise related to the theories and methods used in the submission, but should be free of potential conflicts (for example, have co-authored a paper in the past five years or are current collaborators on a project).

Opposed reviewers should not be chosen simply because they have different theoretical or methodological perspectives relevant to the submitted paper and may disagree with points in the paper. Indeed, such critical reviewers may help strengthen the paper.

Rather, opposed reviewers would be scholars whom the authors believe will be unable to provide a fair and/or professional review of the paper because of a conflict of interest or for similar reasons.

The default review policy for the Journal is unmasked review. However, authors can request a masked review. They should note their preference in a cover letter and make sure that their identity is not revealed elsewhere in the manuscript, including grant numbers, names of institutions providing IRB approval, self-citations, and links to online repositories for 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.

In an effort to encourage development of scientific expertise of junior researchers, the Journal maintains a student review program. Reviewers may invite an advanced graduate or postdoctoral student to prepare an independent "parallel" review. Such parallel reviews may be used in addition to (but not as a replacement for) the normal review process.

As appropriate, these reviews will be specially tagged and furnished to the authors. Student reviewers will be acknowledged for their reviews in the Journal at the end of the year. Reviewers should inform the editor at the time of accepting the invitation to review that they wish to involve a student in the review process.

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

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.

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

Below are additional instructions regarding the preparation of display equations, computer code, and tables.

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) 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, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 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 will be asked to identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to this 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:

Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author.

Authors must include a detailed description of the study participants in the method section of each empirical report, including (but not limited to) the following:

In both the abstract and in the discussion section of the manuscript, authors must discuss the diversity of their study samples and the generalizability of their findings (see also the constraints on generality section below).

Authors are also encouraged to justify their sample demographics in the discussion section. If Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) or all-White samples are used, authors should justify their samples and describe their sample inclusion efforts (see Roberts, et al., 2020 for more information on justifying sample demographics).

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.

Authors should disclose the year(s) of data collection in both the abstract and in the method section in order to appropriately contextualize the study. 

In a subsection of the discussion titled "Constraints on generality," authors should include a detailed discussion of the limits on generality (see Simons, Shoda, & Lindsay, 2017). In this section, authors should detail grounds for concluding why the results are may or may not be specific to the characteristics of the participants. They should address limits on generality not only for participants but for materials, procedures, and context. Authors should also specify which methods they think could be varied without affecting the result and which should remain constant.

Authors submitting manuscripts to the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied are required to provide 2–3 (between 120–150 words) brief sentences regarding the public significance 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.

Examples:

To be maximally useful, these statements of public significance should not simply be sentences lifted directly out of 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 the Guidance for Translational Abstracts and Public Significance Statements page to help you write this text.

All manuscripts must include an abstract of no more than 200 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases.

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:

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

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

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

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. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20240.v8

Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package.  Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1–48. https://www.jstatsoft.org/v36/i03/

Wickham, H. et al., (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686

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

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

Line weights

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:

Authors must adhere to the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. 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 JARS:

The guidelines focus on transparency in methods reporting, recommending descriptions of how the researcher's own perspective affected the study, as well as the contexts in which the research and analysis took place.

APA endorses the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines by a community working group in conjunction with the Center for Open Science (Nosek et al. 2015). Empirical research, including meta-analyses, submitted to the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied must at least meet the “requirement” level for all aspects of research planning and reporting. Authors should include a subsection in the method section titled “Transparency and Openness.” This subsection should detail the efforts the authors have made to comply with the TOP guidelines.

For example:

Authors must state whether data and study materials are posted to a trusted repository and how to access them. If they cannot be made available, authors must state the legal or ethical reasons why they are not available. Recommended repositories include APA’s repository on the Open Science Framework (OSF), or authors can access a full list of other recommended repositories. Trusted repositories adhere to policies that make data discoverable, accessible, usable, and preserved for the long term. Trusted repositories also assign unique and persistent identifiers.

In a subsection titled "Transparency and Openness" at the end of the method section, specify whether and where the data and materials are available or note the legal or ethical reasons for not doing so. For submissions with quantitative or simulation analytic methods, state whether the study analysis code is posted to a trusted repository, and, if so, how to access it (or the legal or ethical reason why it is not available). For example:

The code behind this analysis/simulation has been made publicly available at the [repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].

Preregistration of studies and specific hypotheses can be a useful tool for making strong theoretical claims. Likewise, preregistration of analysis plans can be useful for distinguishing confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Investigators are encouraged to preregister their studies and analysis plans prior to conducting their research via a publicly accessible registry system (e.g., OSF, ClinicalTrials.gov, or other trial registries in the WHO Registry Network). There are many available templates; for example, APA, the British Psychological Society, and the German Psychological Society partnered with the Leibniz Institute for Psychology and Center for Open Science to create Preregistration Standards for Quantitative Research in Psychology (Bosnjak et al., 2022).

Articles must state whether or not any work was preregistered and, if so, where to access the preregistration. Preregistrations must be available to reviewers; authors may submit a masked copy via stable link or supplemental material. Links in the method section and the author note should be replaced with an identifiable copy on acceptance.

For example:

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.

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

For the other JEP journals, authors should submit manuscripts according to the manuscript submission guidelines for each individual journal:

When one of the editors believes a manuscript is clearly more appropriate for an alternative APA journal, the editor may redirect the manuscript with the approval of the author.

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.

For full details on publication policies, including use of Artificial Intelligence tools, please see APA Publishing 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).

In light of changing patterns of scientific knowledge dissemination, APA requires authors to provide information on prior dissemination of the data and narrative interpretations of the data/research appearing in the manuscript (e.g., if some or all were presented at a conference or meeting, posted on a listserv, shared on a website, including academic social networks like ResearchGate, etc.). This information (2–4 sentences) must be provided as part of the author note.

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.

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.

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.