Communications Psychology celebrates the publication of the journal’s first two Stage-2 Registered Reports. We encourage researchers regardless of career stage to consider the format and highlight some considerations for PhD students and early career researchers.

This Registered Report replicates the finding that not checking the personal cost of helping signals trustworthiness. However, in a third-party punishment setup, avoidance of cost-checking only increased trustworthiness in those who also do not punish.

Players in the ultimatum game who deliberately choose to be ignorant about whether they received an unfair offer are more likely to accept unfair offers than participants who actively choose to know.

Most psychological measures are used only once or twice. This proliferation and variability threaten the credibility of research. The Standardisation Of BEhavior Research (SOBER) guidelines aim to ensure that psychological measures are standardised and, unlike toothbrushes, reused by others.

The social value of interpersonal relationships was quantified by participants reporting the likelihood of engaging in various free time activities with different social partners and then applying a model-based signature of individual activity value to these ratings. The ensuing scores correlated with self-reported relationship quality and social loss aversion.

Affective research generates more diverse citations that cover a higher variety of research fields when compared to cognitive research. This occurs despite a more narrow focus of topics included in the original affective articles themselves

A single instance of exercise improves cognitive task performance especially in regard to reaction time. Cycling and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) were found to be particularly beneficial.

Reinforcement learning strategies and motor performance are linked. Participants show poorer motor performance when they adopt or shift towards a model-free strategy under threat of electric shocks than when they use a model-based strategy.

Across replications, threat-of-shock during encoding impairs emotional face recognition; a mega-analysis across studies implicates increased BOLD activity in anterior and posterior cingulate cortex in the process.

Namibian Hai||om and Ovambo children aged 6 to 10 were generally risk averse. However, across both cultures and ages, boys were less risk averse than girls, especially in the presence of peers.

Interventions targeting children’s eco-anxiety have focused on fostering hope, however this is disconnected from children’s need to explore and express despair regarding the climate crisis. Adults can help by acknowledging and discussing these emotions with children.

Communications Psychology is celebrating its first birthday and has recently reached the publication of its 100th peer-reviewed paper. We mark our transition to toddlerhood by reflecting on publications, milestones, and development.

16-month-old infants showed heightened theta oscillations for informative versus uninformative causal evidence. This relationship was more pronounced in infants who subsequently made correct predictions based on this information.