Jagiello et al.'s bifocal stance theory provides a useful theoretical framework for attempting to understand the connection between greater adherence to traditional norms and greater sensitivity to threats in the world. Here, we examine the implications of the instrumental and ritual stances with regard to various evolutionary explanations for traditionalism–threat sensitivity linkages.

Early adversity is considered a major risk factor for adult posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Simultaneously, however, early adversity is also known to contribute to psychological resilience, and, indeed, some high-adversity groups do not display elevated PTSD risk. We explored correlates of PTSD in the Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers military dataset to evaluate contrasting accounts of the relationship between early adversity and PTSD. The standard deficit model depicts ontogeny as inherently vulnerable to insult, such that early adversity yields a less robust adult phenotype. A complementary life history theory account holds that adverse early experiences cue a fast life history orientation that reduces investment in maintenance, yielding an adult phenotype less able to recover from trauma. An opposing life history theory account holds that early adversity cues expectations of an adverse adult environment, adaptively reducing reactivity to adverse events. We use principal component analysis to extract a latent variable representing several childhood experiences and multiple lifestyle factors that plausibly proxy life history orientation. After correcting for covariates, we find a strong positive influence of such proxies on PTSD risk, suggesting that early adversity may indeed increase risk for PTSD, and thus that either the standard deficit model, the reduced maintenance account or a combination are correct.

The target article argues that contempt is a sentiment, and that sentiments are the deep structure of social affect. The 26 commentaries meet these claims with a range of exciting extensions and applications, as well as critiques. Most significantly, we reply that construction and emergence are necessary for, not incompatible with, evolved design, while parsimony requires explanatory adequacy and predictive accuracy, not mere simplicity.

Contempt is typically studied as a uniquely human moral emotion. However, this approach has yielded inconclusive results. We argue this is because the folk affect concept “contempt” has been inaccurately mapped onto basic affect systems. “Contempt” has features that are inconsistent with a basic emotion, especially its protracted duration and frequently cold phenomenology. Yet other features are inconsistent with a basic attitude. Nonetheless, the features of “contempt” functionally cohere. To account for this, we revive and reconfigure the sentiment construct using the notion of evolved functional specialization. We develop the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion (ASE) model of sentiments, in which enduring attitudes represent others' social-relational value and moderate discrete emotions across scenarios. Sentiments are functional networks of attitudes and emotions. Distinct sentiments, including love, respect, like, hate, and fear, track distinct relational affordances, and each is emotionally pluripotent, thereby serving both bookkeeping and commitment functions within relationships. The sentiment contempt is an absence of respect; from cues to others' low efficacy, it represents them as worthless and small, muting compassion, guilt, and shame and potentiating anger, disgust, and mirth. This sentiment is ancient yet implicated in the ratcheting evolution of human ultrasocialty. The manifolds of the contempt network, differentially engaged across individuals and populations, explain the features of “contempt,” its translatability, and its variable experience as “hot” or “cold,” occurrent or enduring, and anger-like or disgust-like. This rapprochement between psychological anthropology and evolutionary psychology contributes both methodological and empirical insights, with broad implications for understanding the functional and cultural organization of social affect.

Market models are indeed indispensable to understanding the evolution of cooperation and its emotional substrates. Unfortunately, Baumard et al. eschew market thinking in stressing the supposed invariance of moral/cooperative behavior across circumstances. To the contrary, humans display contingent morality/cooperation, and these shifts are best accounted for by market models of partner choice for mutually beneficial collaboration.

We question whether the postulated revenge and forgiveness systems constitute true adaptations. Revenge and forgiveness are the products of multiple motivational systems and capacities, many of which did not exclusively evolve to support deterrence. Anger is more aptly construed as an adaptation that organizes independent mechanisms to deter transgressors than as the mediator of a distinct revenge adaptation.

Claims regarding negative strong reciprocity do indeed rest on experiments lacking established external validity, often without even a small “menu of options.” Guala's review should prompt strong reciprocity proponents to extend the real-world validity of their work, exploring the preferences participants bring to experiments. That said, Guala's approach fails to differentiate among group selection approaches and glosses over cross-cultural variability.

Elqayam & Evans (E&E) suggest descriptivism as a way to avoid fallacies and research biases. We argue, first, that descriptive and prescriptive theories might be better off with a closer interaction between “is” and “ought.” Moreover, while we acknowledge the problematic nature of the discussed fallacies and biases, important aspects of research would be lost through a broad application of descriptivism.

In addition to questions of the representativeness of Western, educated samples vis-à-vis the rest of humanity, the prevailing practice of studying individuals who are culturally similar to the investigator entails the problem that key features of the phenomena under investigation may often go unrecognized. This will occur when investigators implicitly rely on folk models that they share with their participants.

If rituals persist in part because of their memory-taxing attributes, from whence do they arise? I suggest that magical practices form the core of rituals, and that many such practices derive from learned pseudo-causal associations. Spurious associations are likely to be acquired during problem-solving under conditions of ambiguity and danger, and are often a consequence of imitative social learning.