We need to change our attitude, and journals can help:Reflections in response to Spiller & Olff (2018)

Adopting Registered Reports is an important step for the European Journal of Psychotraumatology to promote open science practices in the field of psychotrauma research. However, adopting these practices requires us as individual researchers to change our perspective fundamentally. We need to put fears of being scooped aside, adopt a permissive stance towards making mistakes and accept that null-results should be part of the scientific record. This is difficult because the culture in academia is competitive. Incentives are on publishing novel and positive results in high impact journals. A change in journal policies, such that openness and transparency are reinforced, can facilitate an attitude change in individual researchers.</p

"I Remember Having Chicken Pox at Age 3":How Can Age Manipulations Affect One's Earliest Childhood Memories?

Adults' reports of earliest autobiographical memories from before the age of 3 are typically scarce. However, recent research suggests that the age range of this childhood amnesia is flexible when participant instructions provide a context in which earlier or later ages of childhood events are plausible (Kingo et al., 2013). This age manipulation may be more or less effective depending on the type of memories, i.e., event memories that describe a specific event, or fragments / snapshots that describe elements of a past event. One earlier study showed that after reading an early age example, the age in event memories was younger than after a late age example, whereas this difference was less pronounced in snapshot memories (Wessel et al., 2019). The present aim was to examine the malleability of the age in earliest childhood memories and replicate this age manipulation by memory type interaction as well as the overall effects of the age manipulation demonstrated earlier (Wessel et al., 2019). Three studies varied the age in example event memories and fragments (early, late, or no age). Overall, the results suggested that age information affects the reported age, but not necessarily more for event memories than for fragments. That is, all present studies failed to replicate the age manipulation by memory type interaction reflecting that relative to the early condition, event memories in the late condition were older than snapshot memories (Wessel et al., 2019). Even though we cannot conclude that a true effect does not exist, the original finding may be taken as reflecting a false positive