Fig. 3.

A schematic illustration of how mentalising and metacognition may play a role in the advice-taking and advice-giving process between a patient and a clinician. Metacognition (indicated in orange) may be used by the patient to understand whether additional evidence is needed (how confident the patient is that their own opinion is correct and that their perceptions are ‘real’). For the clinician, metacognition is involved in expressing the right level of confidence in the advice (how confident the clinician is that their advice is correct). Mentalising (indicated in blue) plays a role in understanding why someone is deciding one way or another, which may be relevant for a clinician to know whether a patient is thinking through the consequences of different courses of action and whether the advice needs to be communicated differently to achieve a given level of influence. For the patient, mentalising may be used to understand the fidelity of the adviser's confidence (the clinician's metacognition). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)