Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental illness affecting ~1 in 100 people (Ellison et al., 2018), characterised by emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, a distorted sense of self, and a long-term pattern of unstable interpersonal relationships. Among this heterogenous range of symptoms is difficulty in the cognitive dimension of empathy, in particular understanding the perspectives of others, which in turn has been suggested to rely on the mirror neuron system, both in the motor and somatosensory domains. The integrity of the mirror system has therefore been a focus for understanding the possible causes or consequences of the disorder, with preliminary studies pointing to hypoactivity of neuronal areas associated with the mirror system in BPD (Mier et al., 2013).

 

In the current study, Zazio et al. (2023) will use crossmodal paired associative stimulation (cm-PAS) in which an image of a hand being touched is repeatedly paired with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) to test the hypothesis that BPD is associated with a specific deficit in the tactile mirror system. In healthy controls, the close temporal coupling (20ms) between the visual depiction of tactile stimulation and TMS of S1 is expected boost tactile acuity and elevate the performance cost of incongruence in a task that manipulates visuo-tactile spatial congruity (VTSC) – effects that are thought to reflect the fidelity of the tactile mirror system.

 

In BPD patients, however, the authors make the crucial prediction that impairment of the tactile mirror system (if present) will lead to a reduced (or even non-existent) effect of cm-PAS on tactile acuity and VTSC task performance compared to healthy controls. To help ensure a severe test of this hypothesis, the design includes a variety of controls, including an attention check, control cm-PAS in which the inter-stimulus interval is increased to 100ms to break the close temporal coupling between visual stimulation and TMS, and a positive control to confirm that active cm-PAS (compared to control cm-PAS) produces the expected boost in tactile acuity in healthy controls.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over three rounds of in-depth review. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/sqnwd
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

References
 

1. Ellison, W. D., Rosenstein, L. K., Morgan, T. A., & Zimmerman, M. (2018). Community and clinical epidemiology of borderline personality disorder. Psychiatric Clinics, 41, 561-573. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2018.07.008

2. Mier, D., Lis, S., Esslinger, C., Sauer, C., Hagenhoff, M., Ulferts, J., Gallhofer, B. & Kirsch, P. (2013). Neuronal correlates of social cognition in borderline personality disorder. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8, 531-537. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss028

 

2. Zazio, A., Guidali, G., Rossi, R., Bolognini, N. & Bortoletto, A. (2023). Cortical plasticity of the tactile mirror system in borderline personality disorder, in principle acceptance of Version 4 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/sqnwd

In a time when open research practices are becoming more widely used to combat questionable research practices (QRPs) in academia, this Registered Report by Pownall and colleagues (2023) empirically investigated the practice of preregistering study plans, which allows us to better understand to what degree such practices increase awareness of QRPs and whether experience with preregistration helps reduce engagement in QRPs. This investigation is timely because results from these kinds of studies are only recently becoming available and the conclusions are providing evidence that open research practices can improve research quality and reliability (e.g., Soderberg et al. 2021, Chambers & Tzavella 2022). The authors crucially focused on the effect of preregistering the undergraduate senior thesis (of psychology students in the UK), which is a key stage in the development of an academic.

 

Pownall and colleagues found that preregistration did not affect attitudes toward QRPs, but it did improve student understanding of open research practices. Using exploratory analyses, they additionally found that those who preregistered were those students who reported that they had more opportunity, motivation, and greater capability. This shows how important it is to incorporate the teaching of open research practices such that students can increase their capability, motivation, and opportunity to pursue such practices, whether it is preregistration or other practices that are better known to reduce QRPs (such as registered reports; Krypotos et al. 2022). 

 

After four rounds of review and revisions, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 2 criteria and awarded a positive recommendation.

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/9hjbw

 

Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that was used to answer the research question was generated until after IPA.

 

 

• Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
• Cambridge Educational Research e-Journal
• Collabra: Psychology
• Experimental Psychology
• F1000Research
• Meta-Psychology
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Royal Society Open Science
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open

 

 

1. Chambers C. D. & Tzavella, L. (2022). The past, present, and future of Registered Reports. Nature Human Behaviour, 6, 29-42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01193-7

 

2. Krypotos, A. M., Mertens, G., Klugkist, I., & Engelhard, I. M. (2022). Preregistration: Definition, advantages, disadvantages, and how it can help against questionable research practices. In Avoiding Questionable Research Practices in Applied Psychology (pp. 343-357). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

 

3. Pownall, M., Pennington, C. R., Norris, E., Juanchich, M., Smaile, D., Russell, S., Gooch, D., Rhys Evans, T., Persson, S., Mak, M. H. C., Tzavella, L., Monk, R., Gough, T., Benwell, C. S. Y., Elsherif, M., Farran, E., Gallagher-Mitchell, T., Kendrick, L. T., Bahnmueller, J., Nordmann, E., Zaneva, M., Gilligan-Lee, K., Bazhydai, M., Jones, A., Sedgmond, J., Holzleitner, I., Reynolds, J., Moss, J., Farrelly, D., Parker, A. J. & Clark, K. (2023). Evaluating the pedagogical effectiveness of study preregistration in the undergraduate dissertation [Stage 2 Registered Report], acceptance of Version 4 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://psyarxiv.com/xg2ah

 

4. Soderberg C. K., Errington T. M., Schiavone S. R., Bottesini J., Thorn F. S., Vazire S., Esterling K. M. & Nosek B. A. (2021) Initial evidence of research quality of registered reports compared with the standard publishing model. Nature Human Behaviour, 5, 990–997. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01142-4

In 2023, the journal eLife ended the practice of making binary accept/reject decisions following peer review, instead sharing peer review reports (for manuscripts that are peer-reviewed) and brief “eLife assessments” representing the consensus opinions of editors and peer reviewers. As part of these assessments, the journal draws language from a "common vocabulary" to linguistically rank the significance of findings and strength of empirical support for the article's conclusions. In particular, the significance of findings is described using an ordinal scale of terms from "landmark" → "fundamental" → "important" → "valuable" → "useful", while the strength of support is ranked across six descending levels from "exceptional" down to "inadequate".

 

In the current study, Hardwicke et al. (2023) question the validity of this taxonomy, noting a range of linguistic ambiguities and counterintuitive characteristics that may undermine the communication of research evaluations to readers. Given the centrality of this common vocabulary to the journal's policy, the authors propose a study to explore whether the language used in the eLife assessments will be interpreted as intended by readers. Using a repeated-measures experimental design, they will tackle three aims: first, to understand the extent to which people share similar interpretations of phrases used to describe scientific research; second, to reveal the extent to which people’s implicit ranking of phrases used to describe scientific research aligns with each other and with the intended ranking; and third, to test whether phrases used to describe scientific research have overlapping interpretations. The proposed study has the potential to make a useful contribution to metascience, as well as being a valuable source of information for other journals potentially interested in following the novel path made by eLife.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over one round of in-depth review. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/mkbtp
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

References
 
1. Hardwicke, T. E., Schiavone, S., Clarke, B. & Vazire, S. (2023). Finding the right words to evaluate research: An empirical appraisal of eLife’s assessment vocabulary. In principle acceptance of Version 2 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/mkbtp

Chronic pain is a major cause of disability that can often poorly managed with pharmacological treatments. This has prompted the exploration of other interventions like resizing illusions of body parts in augmented reality. These illusions have shown promise in conditions like osteoarthritis and complex regional pain syndrome, but it remains unclear how they alter the neural representation of body parts in the brain. The study by Hansford and colleagues aims to investigate these mechanisms in healthy participants, using somatosensory steady state evoked potentials (SSEP) and self-report questionnaires.

 

The study will involve finger stretching in an augmented reality setup that allows the researchers to independently manipulate visual and tactical stimulation. Assuming that multisensory stimulation indeed produces a robust illusion, the researchers will quantify the somatosensory evoked potentials in multisensory, unisensory, and two non-illusion control conditions. The study will provide inights into the neural mechanisms of these illusions and lay the ground for future investigations of these processes as a potential treatment for chronic pain.

 

The manuscript was evaluated over seven rounds of in-depth review by the recommender and three expert reviewers. After substantial revisions, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/u6gsb
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

References
 
1. Hansford, K. J., Baker, D. H., McKenzie, K. J., & Preston, C. E. J. (2023). Somatosensory Response Changes During Illusory Finger Stretching. In principle acceptance of Version 7 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/u6gsb

Rhythmic changes in pain can lead to corresponding modulations of EEG amplitudes in theta, alpha, and beta bands. But the question remains open as to whether these modulations are actually tracking pain, or maybe rather saliency or stimulus intensity. The question is of some importance because a marker of pain per se could be useful for tracking felt pain without a verbal response, and could be useful in investigating interventions for treating pain (such as suggestion).  Here, Leu et al. (2023) will address the question of whether modulations reflect saliency or else the intensity of pain, by using an oddball paradigm in which most trials are a pain stimulus of a certain intensity, and oddball trials will sometimes occur, at either a higher intensity or a lower intensity than the baseline ones. If the modulations reflect salience, the modulation at the frequency of the oddball will be similar for high and low intensity oddballs. However, if the modulations reflect pain intensity, the modulations for the low rather than high oddball condition will be lower.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over three rounds of in-depth peer review, the first two consisting of substantial comments from two scholars with relevant expertise, and the third consisting of a close review by the recommender. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/qbrf2
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.

 

List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

 

References
 
1. Leu, C., Forest, S., Legrain, V., & Liberati, G. (2023). The effect of stimulus saliency on the modulation of pain-related ongoing neural oscillations: a Registered Report. In principle acceptance of Version 4 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/qbrf2