Sex differences in motivation and emotional reactions to casual sex suggest that the links to extraversion, constraint, impulsivity-sensation seeking, and sexual behavior differ for men and women. Because both testosterone and dominance, and dominance and number of sex partners appear to correlate in men but not in women, it is plausible that testosterone is involved in the creation and maintenance of these sex differences in linkage among the behavioral subsystems involved in sexuality and extraversion.

Krueger & Funder (K&F) overstate the defects of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), and with it the magnitude of negativity bias within social psychology. We argue that replication matters more than NHST, that the pitfalls of NHST are not always or necessarily realized, and that not all biases are harmless offshoots of adaptive mental abilities.

The fact that the female mammalian brain remains responsive to estrogens throughout life may open the way for other instigators of neuronal plasticity, making the female brain different from that of the male in its response to the actions of a number of hormones, to injury and to aging.

Sensory motor contingencies belong to a functionalistic framework. Functionalism does not explain why and how objective functional relations produce phenomenal experience. O'Regan & Noë (O&N) as well as other functionalists do not propose a new ontology that could support the first person subjective phenomenal side of experience.

According to Pylyshyn, the early visual system is able to categorize perceptual inputs into shape classes based on visual similarity criteria; it is also suggested that written words may be categorized within early vision. This speculation is contradicted by the fact that visually unrelated exemplars of a given letter (e.g., a/A) or word (e.g., read/READ) map onto common visual categories.

By focusing primarily on communication between adult and child and on adult-set criteria for appropriate action, Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) account of the development of social understanding in the epistemic triangle tends toward an enculturation view, while diminishing the role of individuals. What their proposed mechanism fails to acknowledge is that the two agents in the epistemic triangle necessarily have independent perspectives of the object and of each other.

Biology can inspire robotic simulations of behavior and thus advance robotics, but the validity of drawing conclusions about real behavior from robotic models is questionable. Robotic models, particularly of learning, do not account, for example, for (a) exaptation: co-opting of previously evolved functions for new behavior, (b) learning through observation, (c) complex biological reality, or (d) limits on computational capacity.

Although Van de Vliert presented an entertaining story containing several original observations, an implicit assumption that climate affects human society identically through the history is not realistic. If almost everything is explained by cold winters or hot summers, then nothing is explained. Ignoring rival explanations does not make the proposed theory more convincing.

Jackendoff's Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (2002) achieves a major shift in the focus and methods of Generative Linguistics (GL). Yet some of the original restrictive features of GL, cognitivism and Cartesianism in particular, remain intact in the new work and take on a more extreme form with the addition of a phenomenalist ontology.

Individual-level interventions are inadequate to address complex societal problems. Meaningful solutions require system-level policies that alter the incentives that govern behavior. We argue that individual-level interventions can help improve both the feasibility and effectiveness of system-level interventions, especially when designed as an integrated policy package.

Contrary to the target article's claims, social cognition research shows considerable learning (about other people) that is relatively automatic. Some of this learning is propositional (spontaneous trait inferences) and some is associative (spontaneous trait transference). Other dichotomies – for example, between learning explicit and implicit attitudes – are also important. However conceived, human conditioning is not synonymous with human learning.

Focus on the evolutionary origins of musicality has been neglected relative to attention on language, so these new proposals are welcome stimulants. We argue for a broad comparative approach to understanding how the elements of musicality evolved, and against the use of overly simplistic evolutionary accounts.

Nettle et al. evaluate evidence for the insurance hypothesis, which links obesity with the perception of food scarcity. Epidemiological findings in this area have generally been weak and inconsistent. The present commentary examines three key methodological issues arising from the literature on the association between obesity and the perception of food scarcity in humans, with suggestions for future epidemiological research.

Moral cognition, by its very nature, stems from intuitions about what is good and bad, and these intuitions influence moral assessments outside of conscious awareness. However, because humans evolved a shared set of moral intuitions, and are compelled to justify their moral assessments as good and rational (even erroneously) to others, moral virtue and moral progress are still possible.