Lindquist et al. argue that emotional categories do not map onto distinct regions within the brain, but rather, arise from basic psychological processes, including conceptualization, executive attention, and core affect. Here, we use examples from cultural neuroscience to argue that psychological constructionism, not locationism, captures the essential role of emotion in the social and cultural brain.

Research on the neural correlates of sexual arousal is a growing field of research in affective neuroscience. A new approach studying the correlation between the hemodynamic cerebral response and autonomic genital response has enabled distinct brain areas to be identified according to their role in inducing penile erection, on the one hand, and in representing penile sensation, on the other.

The received view in historical linguistics is that there is always an inverse relation between token frequency and likelihood of analogical change. I have found evidence, however, of a sharp difference in frequency effects between regularization and nonregularizing analogical change. I argue that this difference can easily be accounted for by dual-mechanism models of inflection but is very problematic for pure associative-memory models.

There must be innate conceptual machinery, but perhaps not as much as Carey proposes. A single mechanism of Perceptual Meaning Analysis that simplifies spatiotemporal information into a small number of conceptual primitives may suffice. This approach avoids the complexities and ambiguities of interactions between separate dedicated analyzers and central concepts that Carey posits, giving learning a somewhat larger role in early concept formation.

Studies of testosterone's effect on dominance are confounded by the effects of dominance experiences on testosterone. Furthermore, antisocial behavior tends to originate prepubertally, when testosterone levels are the same for aggressive males, nonaggressive males, and females. It seems more parsimonious to view variation in testosterone as an effect of dominance-related mood states than to invoke a reciprocal model.

Chow's endorsement of a limited role for null hypothesis significance testing is a needed corrective of research malpractice, but his decision to place this procedure in a hypothetico-deductive framework of Popperian cast is unwise. Various failures of this version of the hypothetico-deductive method have negative implications for Chow's treatment of significance testing, meta-analysis, and theory evaluation.

While I agree with the distinction between expedient and proper ways of action, I find Jagiello et al.'s account of “stance switching” debatable. Fundamental to theories of cultural evolution is the fact that the shared environment is indefinitely rich, in which individuals are provided with opportunities for learning to tune themselves to specific affordances that are relevant to emerging situations.

We raise three issues concerning the Eichenbaum, Otto & Cohen (1994) model. (1) We argue against the strict division of labor that Eichenbaum et al. attribute to neocortical and limbic regions. (2) We raise the possibility that the anterior and posterior portions of the hippocampus may be important for different types of information processing. (3) We argue that, rather than reflecting relational processing, different neural responses to “match” and “nonmatch” trials may relate to different required spatial responses.

Faced with probabilistic relationships between causes and effects, quantum theory assumes that deterministic causes do not exist, and that only incomplete probabilistic expressions of knowledge are possible. As in its application to physics, this fundamental epistemological stance severely limits the ability of quantum theory to provide insight and understanding in human cognition.

The widespread replication of research findings in independent laboratories prior to publication is suggested as a complement to traditional replication approaches. The pre-publication independent replication approach further addresses three key concerns from replication skeptics by systematically taking context into account, reducing reputational costs for original authors and replicators, and increasing the theoretical value of failed replications.

Three complementary points to Jaswal & Akhtar are raised: (1) As a person with autism, I desire sociality despite vulnerability to others’ antisocial behaviour; (2) Asperger's conflation of autism with psychopathy (Czech 2018) likely caused clinicians to disregard social motivation among those with autism; and (3) adverse experiences cause social-engagement diversity to develop in all people, not just those on the spectrum.

the act/omission distinction is likely to lead to biases and be used as a moral heuristic. however, it is frequently difficult to determine whether this act/omission distinction is responsible for a judgment outside the lab. further, more encompassing theories of omission bias are needed to make progress in dealing with its harmful consequences. one such theory is briefly presented.

Part of the generalizability issues that haunt controlled lab experiment designs in psychology, and more particularly in psycholinguistics, can be alleviated by adopting corpus linguistic methods. These work with natural data. This advantage comes at a cost: in corpus studies, lexemes and language users can show different kinds of skew. We discuss a number of solutions to bolster the control.

Norenzayan et al. propose that Big God (BG) religions are large-group cooperative enterprises that promote internal harmony and higher fertility, resulting in “mutually beneficial exchanges” for those involved. We examine the possible distributions of costs and benefits within BG religions and propose that they are, instead, successful coordinating mechanisms that rely on intragroup competition and exploitation between the classes and sexes.

Aggleton & Brown propose that familiarity-based recognition depends on a perirhinal-medial dorsal thalamic system. However, connections between these structures are sparse or absent. In contrast, the perirhinal cortex is connected to midline/intralaminar nuclei. In a human, a lesion in this thalamic domain, sparing the medial dorsal nucleus, impaired familiarity-based recognition while sparing recollective-based recognition. It is thus more likely that the intralaminar/midline nuclei are involved in recognition.