Reviews & Analysis

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.

Associations between stigma and health are typically treated as stagnant. In this Perspective, Earnshaw et al. argue that considering stigma in relation to historical, human development and status course timescales can advance progress in understanding and addressing stigma to improve health.

Theory of mind is the capacity to understand that other people have their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. In this Review, Rakoczy describes the developmental trajectory of theory of mind and discusses the distinction between implicit and explicit forms of this capacity.

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling one’s own actions and associated external events. In this Review, Wen and Imamizu describe how the sense of agency shapes human perception and behaviour and summarize how the sense of agency is altered in human–machine interactions.

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 quality of romantic relationships influences physical and mental health. However, maintaining happy and healthy relationships is challenging. In this Review, Righetti et al. examine the key factors that have been linked to relationship satisfaction in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

According to instance theory, semantic knowledge emerges from episodic memories without a distinct semantic memory system. In this Perspective, Jamieson et al. propose instance theory as a general theory of cognition across memory, language and associative learning, and outline future work to extend this approach.

Studying action is key for understanding perception because perceptual processes are shaped by movements of the sensory surface. In this Perspective, Rolfs and Schweitzer propose four hallmarks of action–perception coupling and outline a research strategy for the study of action kinematics in perception.

Individuals with substance use disorders, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy are over-represented in the criminal legal system. In this Review, Baskin-Sommers et al. summarize cognitive–affective factors that give rise to these disinhibitory disorders, and discuss implications for legal intervention.

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.

Romantic attachment insecurity undermines long-term relationship functioning and well-being. In this Review, Overall and colleagues describe processes that buffer the effects of attachment insecurity within couple interactions, associated spillover effects that shape functioning across couple and family contexts, and ways to contain spillover to improve well-being.

Mental health concerns are common, but many people have difficulty accessing appropriate mental health care. In this Review, Lattie et al. present an overview of digital mental health services and provide recommendations for increasing their accessibility.

Face-to-face social interaction depends on dynamic integration and coordination of verbal and non-verbal information. In this Review, Hadley et al. describe the ways that social interaction behaviour can be categorized, the theories available to interpret current work and the methods used to test these theories.

Training on certain cognitive tasks increases performance in the trained tasks, but these benefits do not always transfer to other tasks and abilities. In this Review, von Bastian et al. synthesize this literature and provide a theoretical framework for understanding and predicting cognitive training gains.

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.

Personality and psychopathology have historically been considered distinct, but research now suggests that they share a common phenotypic structure. In this Perspective, Hopwood et al. argue that person–environment transactions across different timescales are key for differentiating personality and psychopathology, and thus for psychiatric diagnosis.