It is a great honour to assume the role of joint editor of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and inspiring to be part of an enthusiastic and supportive team. The Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry has shown its open-mindedness and international orientation by electing, for the first time in its history, a joint editor who is not a native speaker of English. I appreciate the trust placed in me, and I hope I will come up to the expectation that, together with my fellow editors, this Journal will maintain, or even strengthen, its high standards and influential position in this rapidly changing field of research in child psychology and psychiatry. I follow in the footsteps of Dorothy Bishop, who I got to know when she was a joint editor and I was an author who had submitted an article to this Journal, anxiously awaiting the editor's decision. I remember I was struck by the skilful scrutiny and supportiveness of her editorial work and I wondered if I would be able to do equally well if I would be an editor, not knowing that years later I would be in a position to take up this challenge.

This issue is especially voluminous, since we wanted to reduce the number of articles in the pipeline awaiting publication. By temporarily increasing the number of pages, we wanted to ensure that the information the reader reaches is up to date and not obsolete by the time it is published.