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In recent years, the scientific community has called for improvements in the credibility, robustness, and reproducibility of research, characterized by increased interest and promotion of open and transparent research practices. While progress has been positive, there is a lack of consideration about how this approach can be embedded into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. Specifically, a critical overview of the literature which investigates how integrating open and reproducible science may influence student outcomes is needed. In this paper, we provide the first critical review of literature surrounding the integration of open and reproducible scholarship into teaching and learning and its associated outcomes in students. Our review highlighted how embedding open and reproducible scholarship appears to be associated with (1) students’ scientific literacies (i.e., students’ understanding of open research, consumption of science, and the development of transferable skills); (2) student engagement (i.e., motivation and engagement with learning, collaboration, and engagement in open research), and (3) students’ attitudes towards science (i.e., trust in science and confidence in research findings). However, our review also identified a need for more robust and rigorous methods within pedagogical research, including more interventional and experimental evaluations of teaching practice. We discuss implications for teaching and learning scholarship.

We argue for combining Participatory Research and Open Scholarship practices as an essential way to advance neurodiversity research. This combination can have manifold benefits: it can strengthen the relationship between members of the public and scientific communities, empower neurodivergent people, and ensure current research is meaningful and impactful to their lives. Eventually, combining participatory and Open Scholarship practices can be a pathway to more open, robust, diverse, and inclusive science.

The emergence of large-scale replication projects yielding successful rates substantially lower than expected caused the behavioural, cognitive, and social sciences to experience a so-called ‘replication crisis’. In this Perspective, we reframe this ‘crisis’ through the lens of a credibility revolution, focusing on positive structural, procedural and community-driven changes. Second, we outline a path to expand ongoing advances and improvements. The credibility revolution has been an impetus to several substantive changes which will have a positive, long-term impact on our research environment.

Study preregistration has become increasingly popular in psychology, but its effectiveness in restricting potentially biasing researcher degrees of freedom remains unclear. We used an extensive protocol to assess the strictness of preregistrations and the consistency between preregistration and publications of 300 preregistered psychology studies. We found that preregistrations often lack methodological details and that undisclosed deviations from preregistered plans are frequent. Combining the strictness and consistency results highlights that biases due to researcher degrees of freedom are prevalent and likely in many preregistered studies. More comprehensive registration templates typically yielded stricter and hence better preregistrations. We did not find that effectiveness of preregistrations differed over time or between original and replication studies. Furthermore, we found that operationalizations of variables were generally more effectively preregistered than other study parts. Inconsistencies between preregistrations and published studies were mainly encountered for data collection procedures, statistical models, and exclusion criteria. Our results indicate that, to unlock the full potential of preregistration, researchers in psychology should aim to write stricter preregistrations, adhere to these preregistrations more faithfully, and more transparently report any deviations from the preregistrations. This could be facilitated by training and education to improve preregistration skills, as well as the development of more comprehensive templates.

To date only a handful of studies from different groups have investigated effects of pain-modulating substances on social capabilities (see e.g., Hartmann et al., 2022; Mischkowski et al., 2016; Rütgen et al., 2015). These mainly involve placebo treatments and suggest a positive relationship between one’s own pain and emotion processing, and resulting reactions towards other people’s pain, and provide causal evidence for the theory of shared representations (Decety & Grèzes, 2006; Lamm & Majdandžić, 2015 for reviews), on the levels of behaviour, event-related potentials (Rütgen, Seidel, Riečanský, et al., 2015), fMRI (Rütgen, Seidel, Silani, et al., 2015) and neurochemistry (Rütgen et al., 2018, 2021). These studies provided evidence that a reduction of first-hand pain (via placebo analgesia) causally decreases empathy for pain. Studies on such transfer effects for prosocial behavior are even more rare (e.g., Hartmann et al., 2022). However, a systematic and comprehensive overview and summary of these studies is still missing. This review intends to close this gap by providing an overview over existing work, and also provide an outlook on future research directions. We aim to identify how directly interfering with the perception of pain in oneself affects our abilities to perceive, process and react to positive and negative emotions (including pain) in other individuals. We will include studies where 1) one’s own pain processing was directly modulated via real treatments, e.g., opioidergic and non-opioidergic pharmacological substances, but also via sham treatments and positive/negative expectations (i.e. placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia); and 2) the effects of these manipulations on social emotions and behavior (e.g., empathy, prosocial behaviour) were measured.

The shared representations account of empathy suggests that sharing other people’s emotions relies on neural processes similar to those engaged when experiencing such emotions oneself. Recent research corroborated this account by showing that experimentally reducing first-hand pain by means of placebo analgesia also resulted in reduced empathy for pain, and decreased activation in the shared neural networks. However, what has not been investigated yet, but is of much greater relevance, is whether the effects of placebo analgesia transfer to actual behavior. In other words, it is still not clear if the reduced empathic abilities, induced with placebo analgesia, have an influence on moral social behavior, that we show towards other, e.g. helping someone in need. With this project we therefore want to investigate in greater detail, to what extent placebo analgesia shows an effect on prosocial behavior.

The shared representations account of empathy suggests that sharing other people’s emotions relies on neural processes similar to those engaged when experiencing such emotions oneself. Recent research corroborated this account by showing that experimentally reducing first-hand pain by means of placebo analgesia also resulted in reduced empathy for pain, and decreased activation in the shared neural networks, namely the affective-motivational component of the pain matrix. However, the role of the more basic sensory-discriminative component in the context of empathy is still not clear. The present project therefore aims to explore the role of the somatosensory part of pain processing during empathy for another’s pain and its modulation by placebo analgesia by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a tailored experimental paradigm.

In recent years, the scientific community has called for improvements in the credibility, robustness and reproducibility of research, characterized by increased interest and promotion of open and transparent research practices. While progress has been positive, there is a lack of consideration about how this approach can be embedded into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. Specifically, a critical overview of the literature which investigates how integrating open and reproducible science may influence student outcomes is needed. In this paper, we provide the first critical review of literature surrounding the integration of open and reproducible scholarship into teaching and learning and its associated outcomes in students. Our review highlighted how embedding open and reproducible scholarship appears to be associated with (i) students' scientific literacies (i.e. students’ understanding of open research, consumption of science and the development of transferable skills); (ii) student engagement (i.e. motivation and engagement with learning, collaboration and engagement in open research) and (iii) students' attitudes towards science (i.e. trust in science and confidence in research findings). However, our review also identified a need for more robust and rigorous methods within pedagogical research, including more interventional and experimental evaluations of teaching practice. We discuss implications for teaching and learning scholarship.

The preprint is about how participatory research movement and neurodiversity movement can benefit the open scholarship movement and vice versa, leading to a more generalisable and accurate science of human behaviour and cognition.

Painkiller administration lowers pain empathy, but whether this also reduces prosocial behavior is unknown. In this preregistered study, we investigated whether inducing analgesia through a placebo painkiller reduced effortful helping. When given the opportunity to reduce the pain of another person, individuals experiencing placebo analgesia ( n = 45 adults from Austria; 21 male, 24 female) made fewer prosocial choices at the lowest helping level and exerted less physical effort when helping, compared with controls whose pain sensitivity was unaltered ( n = 45; 21 male, 24 female). Self-reported empathic unpleasantness positively correlated with prosocial choices across the whole sample. While not replicating group differences in empathy, a mediation analysis revealed that the level of unpleasantness to other people’s pain fully mediated the effect of placebo analgesia on prosocial choices. Given the importance of prosociality for social cohesion, these findings have broad potential implications both for individuals under the influence of painkillers and for society at large.

The shared representations account of empathy suggests that sharing other people’s emotions relies on neural processes similar to those engaged when experiencing such emotions oneself. Recent research corroborated this account by showing that experimentally reducing first-hand pain by means of placebo analgesia also resulted in reduced empathy for pain, and decreased activation in the shared neural networks. In this project, we are interested whether placebo analgesia, besides influencing processing of our own and other people's pain, has effects on other neutral bodily states that are unrelated to pain. Previous studies have already shed light on associations between pain perception and the perception of one’s own body, also called interoception, but results so far are contradicting and causal investigations of this association are missing.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-pss-10.1177_09567976221119727 for Placebo Analgesia Reduces Costly Prosocial Helping to Lower Another Person’s Pain by Helena Hartmann, Paul A. G. Forbes, Markus Rütgen and Claus Lamm in Psychological Science

Empathie und prosoziales Verhalten sind grundlegende Fähigkeiten für den sozialen Zusammenhalt und die Bindung zwischen Menschen. Frühere Forschung konnte zeigen, dass wir den Schmerz anderer Personen nachempfinden, indem wir neuronale Prozesse aktivieren, die auch dann ablaufen, wenn wir selbst Schmerz empfinden – sogenannte ‚geteilte Repräsentationen‘. Kausale Belege für solche geteilten Repräsentationen konnten durch ausgeklügelte psychopharmakologische Manipulationen wie Placebo Analgesie gezeigt werden – die Reduktion eigener Schmerzwahrnehmung durch ein Placebo-Schmerzmittel. Placebo Analgesie verringerte sowohl subjektive Empathie Bewertungen als auch Gehirnaktivität innerhalb der affektiv-motivationalen Komponente der Schmerzverarbeitung, insbesondere in der anterioren Inselrinde und im anterioren, mittleren zingulären Kortex. Während bisherige Forschung zwar bereits die Grundlage für das Verständnis der Verarbeitung von Empathie im Gehirn geschaffen hat, bleiben mehrere entscheidende Fragen zur Spezifität geteilter Repräsentationen unbeantwortet. Die vorliegende, kumulative Dissertation verfolgte einen sozialneurowissenschaftlichen, multimethodischen Ansatz, um bestehende Erkenntnisse über die neuronalen Grundlagen von Empathie und prosozialem Verhalten im Bereich Schmerz zu erweitern. Ziel der Arbeit war es, das Konzept der geteilten Repräsentationen von eigenem Schmerz und Empathie für Schmerz durch die Kombination von Placebo Analgesie mit maßgeschneiderten experimentellen Designs, psychologischen Aufgaben und funktioneller Magnetresonanztomographie zu spezifizieren. Diese Dissertation umfasst drei empirische Studien, von denen zwei bereits veröffentlicht sind und eine bei einer wissenschaftlichen Fachzeitschrift eingereicht wurde. In Studien 1 und 2 wurde mithilfe zweier klassischer Empathie Aufgaben untersucht, ob geteilte Repräsentationen neben der affektiv-motivationalen auch die sensorisch-diskriminative Komponente der Schmerzverarbeitung nutzen. Die Ergebnisse replizierten überlappende Hirnaktivität in der affektiv-motivationalen Komponente bei eigenem Schmerz und Empathie für Schmerz, gaben aber keine Hinweise auf geteilte, somatosensorische Repräsentationen. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass Empathie für Schmerz eher auf dem Teilen des allgemeinen affektiven Zustands Anderer beruht als auf dem spezifischen somatosensorischen Zustand. Studie 3 untersuchte darauf aufbauend, ob die schmerzsenkende Wirkung von Placebo Analgesie neben einer Verringerung der Schmerzempathie auch das prosoziale Verhalten beeinflusst. Wenn Versuchspersonen die Schmerzen einer anderen Person durch körperliche Anstrengung reduzieren konnten, trafen Personen unter dem Einfluss von Placebo Analgesie weniger prosoziale Entscheidungen (abhängig davon, wie sehr sie in einer bestimmten Situation helfen konnten), halfen weniger schnell und strengten sich beim Helfen weniger an als Kontrollpersonen mit unveränderter Schmerzempfindlichkeit. Darüber hinaus waren subjektive unangenehme Gefühle beim Beobachten der anderen Person, welche schmerzhafte elektrische Stimulationen bekam, mit mehr prosozialen Entscheidungen assoziiert. Diese Ergebnisse zeigen, dass eine verringerte Schmerzempfindlichkeit nicht nur die Art und Weise beeinflusst, wie wir den Schmerz anderer wahrnehmen und teilen, sondern auch unsere soziale Motivation und Verhalten. Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit sind wichtig, um besser zu verstehen, wie Empathie im Gehirn entsteht, verarbeitet wird und wie dies mit prosozialem Verhalten zusammenhängt., Empathy and prosocial behavior are crucial skills for social cohesion and bonding among individuals. Previous research has highlighted that we come to empathize with the pain of other individuals by activating neural processes that are also engaged when we feel pain ourselves – so-called ‘shared representations’. Causal evidence for such shared representations has been shown through sophisticated psychopharmacological manipulations such as placebo analgesia – the downregulation of one’s own pain by means of a placebo painkiller. Placebo analgesia reduced both subjective ratings for pain empathy as well as decreased neural activation in the affective-motivational component of pain processing, namely in anterior insula, and anterior midcingulate cortex. While this research already set the basis for understanding how empathy is processed in the brain, several crucial questions that concern the specificity of shared representations between first-hand and empathy for pain remain unanswered. The present dissertation adopted a multi-method, social neuroscience approach to advance existing insights into the neural underpinnings of empathy and prosocial behavior in the domain of pain. It aimed to specify and extend the shared representations account of first-hand pain and empathy for pain, by combining placebo analgesia with tailored experimental designs, psychological tasks, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. This PhD thesis comprises three empirical studies, two already published and one submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Studies 1 and 2 explored whether shared representations extend beyond the affective-motivational to the sensory-discriminative component of pain processing using two classic empathy for pain paradigms. The results replicated an overlap brain activity in the affective-motivational component but showed no evidence for somatosensory sharing. This suggests that empathy for pain may rely more on sharing another’s general affective, compared to their specific somatosensory state. Subsequently, Study 3 investigated whether the pain-reducing effect of placebo analgesia reaches beyond pain empathy up to influencing prosocial behavior. When given the opportunity to reduce the pain of another individual by exerting physical effort, people under the influence of placebo analgesia made fewer prosocial choices (dependent on how much they could help in a given situation), helped less quickly, and exerted less physical effort when helping, compared to control participants with unaltered pain sensitivity. Moreover, self-reported unpleasantness when observing the other person getting painful electrical stimulation was associated with more prosocial choices. These results showed that reduced pain sensitivity not only influences how we perceive and share others’ pain, but also critically affects our social motivation and behavior. The findings of this thesis are important for further understanding how empathy is represented in the brain and how it is connected to prosocial behavior.

Open Science has much to offer Early-Career Researchers (ECRs) at the start of their research career. For example, Open Science allows ECRs to be credited appropriately for their work, provides opportunity for the wide dissemination of research outputs, and highly values collaboration and collegiality. Indeed, ECRs have contributed substantially to the development and promotion of Open Science, championing initiatives such as journal clubs, how-to guides, and online communities. However, despite the vast contribution of ECRs to this conversation, there has been a notable lack of consideration for how the goals and tools of Open Science align with early career research that stems from a distinctly feminist perspective. In this poster, we discuss the unique position that feminist ECRs occupy in the context of Open Science and provide six evidence-based tips for feminist ECRs who wish to engage with the Open Science conversation. This poster reflects a collaboration between ten feminist ECRs who represent diverse areas of research, backgrounds, and methodologies. Thus, these six tips are a result of both evidence from psychology and metascience, as well as a result of personal reflections on our journeys into and through Open Science spaces. Our six tips are: ‘Start at your own pace’, ‘Do what you need to survive’, ‘Engage in research advocacy’, ‘Be as open as possible’, ‘Find (or create) your community’ and ‘Consider alternative and diverse mentorship’. These tips reflect upon our experiences of navigating Open Science and are designed to provide concrete action-based recommendations for feminist ECRs as they include the principles of Open Science into their scholarly practice. Thus, the practice benefits of this poster are vast.&nbsp