This commentary examines publicly available information on 2017–2018 outcomes in the UK government’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, a National Health Service (NHS) primary care mental health programme in England. In that year there were 1.4 million referrals into IAPT and over 500,000 people completed a course of treatment. The IAPT database collects routine session-by-session outcome monitoring data for this population, including outcomes for depression and anxiety in a stepped care model which includes a range of psychological therapies, among them Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Person-centred Experiential Therapy, known in the IAPT programme as Counselling for Depression (CfD). In 2017–18, 32% of all referrals were for anxiety and stress disorders, 26% for depression, and 35% were unspecified. The definition of treatment completion is receipt of 2 sessions or more and on this basis 60% of all referrals in 2017–18 did not complete treatment, predominantly because they failed to attend the initial appointment, or ended after only one session. Four years of data on outcomes for CBT and CfD suggests these therapies are broadly comparable in terms of both recovery rate and average number of sessions, though the number of referrals to each therapy varied widely. Data on treatment choice and satisfaction was favourable but there were issues with low return rates and invalid data. Information on outcomes for ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and religion, as well as a measure of local economic deprivation, indicate lower outcomes for a number of patient groups. Data on employment status outcomes suggest little overall change, including for the category of those on benefits payments. The data published alongside the annual IAPT reports mean there is an increasing amount of information in the public domain about IAPT performance, but it is time consuming to extract and evaluate. This report highlights a number of points of concern which suggest the need for improvement on multiple axes. We suggest that improved researcher access to the huge IAPT dataset can allow for more detailed evaluations of IAPT that can inform policy/decision-making to improve outcomes for clients.

Four experiments examined spatial correlates of the experience of coherence, that is, the extent to which propositions 'fit together'. Experiment 1 demonstrates for Heiderian triads (i.e., sets of liking/disliking relations between three fictitious persons) that name pairs from balanced triads, such as two friends commonly disliking a third person (high coherence) are seen as closer to each other in physical space as compared to name pairs from unbalanced triads, such as two persons disliking each other and having a common friend (low coherence). This pattern of results is conceptually replicated in two further experiments for categorical syllogisms. Two terms in conclusions from valid syllogisms (high coherence) were seen as spatially closer to each other than when two terms came from invalid syllogisms (low coherence). In the final two experiments, similar closeness effects are demonstrated for word pairs from scenarios that "made sense" in terms of causal connectedness (latent causality) as opposed to word pairs from scenarios perceived as causally unconnected. These findings are discussed in the context of spatial binding theories, applied psychology, and embodied cognition in general, and their methodological implications are highlighted.Word count: 184 1 In this research we seek to present evidence for spatial processing as a correlate, or mediating mechanism, of the experience of coherence. 'Coherence', or the extent to which claims or pieces of evidence 'fit' together, is a notion that is central to people's evaluation of information. It has consequently attracted interest from philosophers (e.g., Olsson, 2005;Bovens & Hartmann, 2003), cognitive scientists interested in theory formation and explanation (e.g., Thagard, 2000), and psychologists interested in the evaluation of evidence, testimony, and witness credibility (e.g., Berman & Cutler, 1996;Berman, Narby, & Cutler, 1995;Brewer, Potter, Fisher, Bond, & Luszcz , 1999;Harris & Hahn, 2009). The concept has also been used to shape or reformulate theories on action planning and goal-related reasoning (Thagard & Millgram, 1995), as well as impression formation, where judgments about other people have to be generated based on piecemeal information on traits and behaviours (Kunda & Thagard, 1996). Also, text and discourse comprehension has been described as a coherence problem, involving the simultaneous assignment of meanings to different words and expressions (Kintsch, 1988; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994).At the most general level, coherence is seen as the degree to which a number of ideas make sense as an entire set. This criterion can be applied to propositions within theoretical systems, whereby coherence appears as a criterion for the truth of the whole system (e.g., Quine & Ullian, 1978). Closer to psychology, Thagard (2000) defined coherence in terms of parallel constraint satisfaction problems, whereby in a process of "mental balancing" (p. 3) complementary and conflicting pieces of information are integrated until they all f...

Humans live in unusually large groups, where relationships are thought to be maintained through complex socio-communicative abilities. The size and quality of social networks are associated with health and well-being outcomes throughout life. However, how some individuals manage to form larger social networks is not well understood. If socio-communicative traits evolved to form and maintain relationships, personality traits should be associated with variation in network size. Here, using the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we investigate the impact of extraversion, agreeableness, and verbal communication on network size ( N = 5,202) and network size change over time ( N = 1,511) in later life for kin and friend networks. Higher levels of extraversion and agreeableness were associated with greater social network sizes but did not predict network size change over 14 years. The findings are discussed considering the evolutionary hypothesis that communicative and affiliative traits may have evolved to support the maintenance of social networks.

Attentional resources might be automatically attracted to highly motivational stimuli such as a possible sexual partner. We tested whether attention would be automatically attracted to images of men vs women in women with a self-reported sexual attraction to men (androphilic), women (gynephilic) or to both men and women (ambiphilic) in a dot-probe paradigm. While androphilic women showed a small bias towards the female images, both ambiphilic and gynephilic women showed a strong bias towards the female images. The results show that these early automatic processes of attention are towards women in this sample of ambiphilic women and therefore inconsistent with their self-report sexual preferences.

Following publication of the original article [1], we have been notified that one of the authors’ names is spelled incorrectly. In this Correction the incorrect and correct author name are shown.