Dear Readers,

It is with great pleasure that I present the second issue of 2023 of the journal Revista Psicologia: Teoria e Prática.

As I reach two years as Editor-in-Chief of the journal, I am pleased to announce that we were reclassified in stratum A2 of the Qualis system of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes) in 2023¹, putting the journal among the highest ranked in Brazil in the field of Psychology. This achievement reflects the dedication of the Editorial Board and the commitment of its members to transparency, an efficient and quick publishing process, and alignment with the ethical aspects that guide the rules of national and international publications. I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that the journal is dynamic, with constant improvements being put in place to improve its quality. Therefore, please do not forget to consult our website to keep up with the latest changes, including information on submission rules, and a range of other important topics².

Our journal also stands out in terms of its diversity and scope, with wide national coverage - with two-thirds of our published articles between 2018 and 2022 being authored by researchers, clinicians, and professors from almost all the states in Brazil, with the remainder from authors affiliated with institutions in the state of São Paulo, where the journal is based. Furthermore, even though the journal is based at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University, only 4% of our articles include an author affiliated with the university, indicating that we avoid publication bias in respect of our institution.

To meet the requirements of the main Brazilian and international indexing systems, we updated the concept of publication rights for articles published by our Journal related to “non-exclusive rights”. Therefore, from July 2022 on, the Journal has accepted articles for submission that have already been published in pre-print format, with the authors continuing to have the right to share (in any format) and adapt the material published with us for any purpose, even if it is commercial (CC-BY 4.0 license), a change which we believe will benefit the authors. Moreover, it should be remembered that the Revista Psicologia: Teoria e Prática is freely accessible and without any submission costs to the authors.

In terms of internationalization, we still need to make more progress in this area, as most of our articles have authors with Brazilian affiliations. However, there has been a gradual increase in the number of studies from authors based in other countries since the journal began to publish 100% of its articles in English in 2017, and an acceleration in this process since 2020, when we started to include invited commentaries from authors outside of Brazil. The current issue presents the interesting, invited commentary from three authors from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in the United States. They discuss the inequalities in science between developed and developing countries regarding the knowledge about the population with autism spectrum disorders and how this can result in important, and often interconnected factors, such as culture, race/ethnicity, finance, and access, among others, being overlooked. In their words ‘The current state of research on autism misses a global picture, including its variability that can be attributed to different social determinants of health’. It’s worth checking.

This issue has 12 other articles that went through a rigorous selection process and were chosen because they present novel results with important themes and/or methodological approaches, which will contribute to the field of Psychology and related areas.

Three of the articles are about the evidence of the validity of different instruments (Volleyball Self-efficacy Scale, Basic Empathy Scale, and Unified Multidimensional Calling Scale - UMCS), while a fourth presents the potential and difficulties involved in using musical composition workshops (hip hop) to engage excluded young people.

Four articles discuss different aspects and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. A scoping review reveals that a lack of tolerance for uncertainty is a predictor of harmful factors among undergraduate students. A second article demonstrates the negative impact of the pandemic on the psychological health of women due to the need to make sudden changes to their everyday lives, the fear of infection and illness, as well as the impact of the unpredictability of the end of the pandemic. A third article describes the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of puerperal women, and reports finding rates of depression and anxiety greater than 40% (according to tracking instruments). The fourth article describes the effects of uncertainty, distress and fear related to COVID-19 among middle-class adult men and women.

Finally, this issue presents four systematic reviews that synthesize the most current evidence on (1) the effects of transcranial stimulation on sleep disorders, (2) the negative and positive attitudes of professionals towards pregnant drug users, (3) the effects of interventions with fathers in the transition to parenthood, and (4) the profile of the use of the Stroop paradigm by Brazilian researchers.

I conclude this editorial by inviting everyone to visit our Instagram page (@revistapsico), which, in addition to providing basic information about the Journal, has been an important means of disseminating published articles, and by thanking my colleagues at the Revista Psicologia for their support as Editor-in-Chief over the last two years, the authors who chose to publish their work with us and, of course, our readers.

I hope that you enjoy reading this current issue.

Sincerely

Prof. Dra. Cristiane Silvestre de Paula Editor-in-Chief, revista Psicologia: Teoria e Prática

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