Military Psychology

Content: Military Psychology is the bimonthly journal of Division 19 (Society for Military Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. The journal seeks to publish groundbreaking articles on research and clinical practice addressing the application of psychological principles to the military environment. The journal publishes research articles, reviews, communications, and case studies having military applications in the areas of Clinical and Counseling Psychology, Health, Social and Personality Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology and Human Factors. Timely topics of major concern to military psychology will also be covered in special journal issues.

Military Psychology is international in scope, and the editors encourage submission of articles that address research being carried out in a variety of national settings.

Contributions will be considered under two major formats:

Regular Articles include Research Articles and Reviews. Research articles contain the reports of original empirical research or quantitative systematic reviews (e.g. meta-analyses). Reviews include scholarly integrations of individual areas of empirical research that provide new insights into an area of military psychology. Regular articles should not exceed 30 pages, inclusive of all text, abstract, references, tables, and figures.

Brief Reports include Short Research Articles, Clinical Practice Notes, and Communications. Short Research Articles are original in their empirical or theoretical contributions but are smaller in scope than a Regular Article or Review. These articles may describe work that is largely confirmatory, advance knowledge arising as by-products of broader studies, or represent new research techniques and methodologies. Clinical Practice Notes include case studies, theoretical articles, program development evaluations, and research articles of direct application for military psychologists in clinical settings. Communications include Information on policies and trends that affect the support and direction of research in military psychology. Brief reports should not exceed 20 pages, inclusive of all text, abstract, references, tables, and figures.

The review process is the same for Regular Articles and Brief Reports. Authors can indicate whether their manuscript should be considered as a Regular Article or a Brief Report. The Action Editor or Editor in Chief may recommend that a Regular Article be trimmed down to a Brief Report based on the judged contribution of the manuscript. Comments and Letters to the Editor will be published on a space-available basis.

Methods articles are a medium-length, peer-reviewed article type that describes an advancement or development of current methods and research procedures. Methods should include adequate and appropriate validation to be considered. Any datasets associated with the paper must publish all experimental controls and make full datasets available where possible. If there are concerns about identifying factors in datasets, these should be discussed with the Editor-in-Chief prior to submission.

Please note that authors submitting protocol and methodology articles have the option to share their methods on PROTOCOLS.IO. Please note, this is not required for submission but is encouraged.

Registered Reports are a form of empirical article in which the methods and proposed analyses are pre-registered and reviewed prior to the research being conducted. High quality protocols are then provisionally accepted for publication before data collection commences. Acceptance in principle indicates that the article will be published pending successful completion of the study according to the pre-registered methods and analytic procedures, as well as inclusion of a defensible and evidence-based interpretation of the results. Full details on the registered reports workflow and policies can be found here.

Data Notes are a short, peer-reviewed article type that concisely describes research data (datasets) stored in a repository, prior to submission. Data Notes do not include any interpretation or conclusion of the data (see preparing your paper). Data Notes should only describe the data. The dataset of Data Notes can be either original (not previously published) or be issued from a published research article as long as the datasets have not already been published.

Comments and Letters to the Editor will be published on a space-available basis.

A non-exhaustive sampling of topics appropriate for Military Psychology includes:

• Mental Health and Combat Exposure
• Environmental contributors to individual and unit performance
• Training deterioration over time
• Trust in automation among UAV operators
• Health and wellbeing of LBGQ service members
• Social support and wellbeing for military personnel and their families
• Unit cohesion and morale
• Adaptive and maladaptive leadership
• Functioning of military teams
• Moral injury
• Psychometric properties of symptom checklists
• Comparative effectiveness of treatments for PTSD
• Military-Civilian transitions
• Determinants of retention and reenlistment
• Stress and coping
• Military sexual trauma
• Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination
• Personality traits as predictors of performance
• Stigma and barriers to mental health treatment
• Prevalence of mental disorders in military populations
• Determinants of resilience among military personnel
• Sexual harassment prevention
• Situation awareness training for pilots
• Reintegration challenges for reserve component personnel

Peer Review Policy: Once a manuscript is processed it is assigned a manuscript control number and given to an Action Editor (one of the Associate Editors) for editorial oversight. The Action Editor will oversee the review process, obtain review from two or more subject matter experts, prepare an editorial recommendation for the manuscript that is provided to the Editor-in-Chief for examination, and following approval by the Editor-in-Chief communicates the final decision to the author(s). The Editor-in-Chief oversees the processing of all articles submitted to the journal and ensures the decision letters are provided to authors in a timely manner.

Publication office: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106.

Authors can choose to publish gold open access in this journal.

Read the Instructions for Authors for information on how to submit your article.