First Anniversary

As we celebrate the first anniversary of Nature Reviews Psychology, we look back at year one.

Misinformation is influential despite unprecedented access to high-quality, factual information. In this Review, Ecker et al. describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that drive sustained belief in misinformation, synthesize the evidence for interventions to reduce its effects and offer recommendations for information consumers and practitioners.

Hearing voices has long been associated with severe mental illness but also occurs in the general population. In this Review, Toh et al. describe the cognitive, neural, personal and sociocultural processes that contribute to voice-hearing in clinical, non-clinical and everyday experience, with emphasis on linking mechanism to phenomenology.

Different languages use distinct writing systems, including the alphabetic system used for English, syllabic system for Korean, and logographic system for Chinese. In this Review, Li and colleagues discuss the similarities and differences among writing systems and consider the consequences for universal cognitive mechanisms for reading.

The patient–therapist alliance is the most consistent predictor of treatment outcome in psychotherapy. In this Review, Zilcha-Mano and Fisher synthesize the literature that distinguishes between state-like strengthening of alliance throughout treatment and trait-like differences between individuals in alliance strength to elucidate when and why alliance predicts treatment outcome.

Subjective time perception involves processing when an event happens relative to another event versus how long an event lasts. In this Review, Coull and Giersch describe the functional and neural differences between temporal order processing and duration estimation by exploring perturbations in individuals with schizophrenia.

Depressive disorders are among the leading causes of global disease burden. In this Perspective, Fried et al. argue that limited progress in understanding, predicting and treating depression despite a wealth of empirical research stems from issues in the methodological and theoretical foundations of depression measurement.

Technology is changing the nature of work by enabling new forms of automation and communication. In this Review, Gagné et al. describe how self-determination theory can help researchers and practitioners to shape the future of work to ensure that it meets the psychological needs of workers.

People spend approximately half of their waking hours inattentive to their surroundings. In this Review, Wamsley describes the beneficial effect that these periods of offline waking rest have on memory, contrasting this benefit and its underlying mechanisms with the effects of sleep.

Decades of research have uncovered effective learning strategies to support student learning. In this Review, Carpenter et al. summarize the literature on spaced learning and retrieval practice strategies, and describe how metacognition guides strategy use in realistic learning situations.

Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. In this Review, Jost et al. provide a conceptual framework that integrates scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted.

Debates about human emotion traditionally pit biological and cultural influences against one another. In this Perspective, Lindquist et al. suggest that emotions are underpinned by neural mechanisms linked to physiological and action regulation, but discrete emotion categories are cultural artefacts that evolved through social transmission.

Individuals who are transgender or nonbinary experience a higher prevalence of certain mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety and disordered eating behaviours. In this Review, Tebbe and Budge discuss these disparities along with factors that protect these individuals from negative outcomes and promote well-being.