Reductionist thinking in neuroscience is manifest in the widespread use of animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders. Broader investigations of diverse behaviors in non-model organisms and longer-term study of the mechanisms of plasticity will yield fundamental insights into the neurobiological, developmental, genetic, and environmental factors contributing to the “massively multifactorial system networks” which go awry in mental disorders.

Heyes's literature review of deception, imitation, and self-recognition is inadequate, misleading, and erroneous. The anaesthetic artifact hypothesis of self-recognition is unsupported by the data she herself examines. Her proposed experiment is tantalizing, indicating that theory of mind is simply a Turing test.

Our response amplifies our case for scientific realism and the unity of science and clarifies our commitments to scientific unity, nonreductionism, behaviorism, and our rejection of talk of “emergence.” We acknowledge support from commentators for our view of physics and, responding to pressure and suggestions from commentators, deny the generality supervenience and explain what this involves. We close by reflecting on the relationship between philosophy and science.

In order to address why the number of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are seemingly exploding in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, it is sensible to look at the evolution of human fearfulness responses. Here, we draw on Veit's pathological complexity framework to advance Grossmann's goal of re-characterizing human fearfulness as an adaptive trait.

Rather than being a genuine adaptation, “positive illusions” are examples of doxastically uncommitted policies implemented at both the individual and societal levels. Even when they are genuine misbeliefs, most positive illusions are not evolved but ephemeral – a phenomenon limited to a particular social and economic moment. They are essentially a consumer response to messages from the pop-psychology industry in the recently terminated era of easy credit.

Sex/gender is a continuous variable that researchers frequently treat as dichotomous. This practice can mask continuous underlying adaptive traits and yield spurious dichotomous “sex differences.” As such, many sex differences in self-protection may be evolutionary by-products of underlying adaptations rather than adaptations themselves. Binary analysis of continuous sex/gender is ill-considered science that can contribute to inequality and counterproductive public policy.

Despite downsides, it must, on balance, be good to reduce prejudice. Despite upsides, collective action can also have destructive outcomes. Improving intergroup relations requires multiple levels of analysis involving a broader approach to prejudice reduction, awareness of potential conflict escalation, development of intergroup understanding, and promotion of a wider human rights perspective.

Ackermann et al. treat both genetic and paleoanthropological data too superficially to support their conclusions. The case of FOXP2 and Neanderthals is a prime example, which I will comment on in some detail; the issues are much more complex than they appear in Ackermann et al.

Physical enclavement, away from out-group members, may determine when identify fusion leads to self-sacrifice. When people surround themselves with ideologically similar others, their attitudes may polarize and become moralized, leading to more violence and hostility toward people who do not share those attitudes. We discuss how this segregation may increase the amount of political violence in typically nonviolent systems.

We propose extrapolating Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) to clinical psychology and psychiatry. We demonstrate how CNT principles may benefit assessment, therapy, and possibly even modify public health views of neuropsychiatric disorders. Our commentary focuses on hoarding disorder as a model, elaborates on discrepancies in the scientific literature and suggests how the CNT may resolve them.

Self-awareness is thought to be tied to processes of higher-order perspective taking including empathy. These abilities appear to be reserved for humans, great apes, and possibly, dolphins. Recent examinations reveal that both self-awareness and empathy may have origins in the right hemisphere. It is possible that, as in language, lateralization plays a key role in the development of higher-order perspective taking and self-awareness.

The research Nevin & Grace report is impressive in its integrative power, but it also shows the current limits of operant theory: There is tremendous concentration on understanding how existing behavioral relations are modulated in rate or time allocation, but little on dealing with the origin of the behavioral relations themselves. Specifying what should count as a behavioral unit will require source principles sensitive to the composition of the units being related.

Dysfunction or injury of pain-transmitting primary afferents' central pathways can result in pain. The organism as a whole responds to such injury and consequently many symptoms of neuropathic pain develop. The nervous system responds to painful events and injury with neuroplasticity. Both peripheral sensitization and central sensitization take place and are mediated by a number of biochemical factors, including genes and receptors. Correction of altered receptors activity is the logical way to intervene therapeutically. [berkley; blumberg et al.; coderre & katz; dickenson; mcmahon; wiesenfeld-hallinet al.]

The mother sacrificing herself while rescuing someone else's child is a red herring. Neither behaviorism nor cognitivism can explain it. Unlike behaviorism, however, the cognitive process of projection can explain cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas.

Accepting Bullot & Reber's (B&R's) criteria for art appreciation would confine the study of aesthetics to those works for which historical information is available, mainly post–eighteenth-century Western “high art.” We reject their contention that “correct” artistic understanding is limited to experts with detailed knowledge or education in art, which implies a narrowly elitist conception of aesthetics. Scientific aesthetics must be broadly inclusive.

An experimenter studies “sensorimotor contingencies”; the stimulus is primary and the subject's response consequential. But the subject, looking at the world from his or her distinctive viewpoint, is occupied with “motorsensory contingencies”; the response is now primary and the sensory consequential. These two categories are gathered together under the one term in the target article. This commentary disambiguates the confusion.