In the précis to The Cognitive-Emotional Brain, I summarize a framework for understanding the organization of cognition and emotion in the brain. Here, I address six major themes that emerged in the commentaries: (1) emotional perception and automaticity; (2) the status of cognition and emotion: together or separate? (3) evolutionary implications for the understanding of emotion and cognition; (4) the diverse forms of cognitive-emotional integration; (5) dual process theories; and (6) functional diversity of brain regions/networks and cognitive ontologies. The central argument is, again, that cognition and emotion are so highly interactive, and indeed integrated, that these two elements blend into a new amalgam.

Mercier and Sperber (M&S) argue that reasoning is social and argumentative, and that this explains many apparently irrational judgment phenomena. We look at the relationship between interpersonal and intrapersonal argumentation and discuss parallels and differences from the perspective of query theory, a memory-based model of constructive preferences. We suggest an important goal is to integrate models across inference and preference.

We would like to thank the commentators for their generous comments, valuable insights and helpful suggestions. We begin this response by discussing the selfishness axiom and the importance of the preferences, beliefs, and constraints framework as a way of modeling some of the proximate influences on human behavior. Next, we broaden the discussion to ultimate-level (that is evolutionary) explanations, where we review and clarify gene-culture coevolutionary theory, and then tackle the possibility that evolutionary approaches that exclude culture might be sufficient to explain the data. Finally, we consider various methodological and epistemological concerns expressed by our commentators.

Normal adults recall poorly social feedback that refers to them, is negative, and pertains to core self-aspects. This phenomenon, dubbed the mnemic neglect effect, is equivalent to inhibitory repression. It is instigated under conditions of high self-threat, it implicates not-thinking during encoding, and it involves memories that are recoverable with such techniques as recognition accuracy.

States of sensory absorption may offer a means to disentangle perception from report. Interestingly, such states lead to an antagonistic relationship between perceptual and cognitive-access networks, suggesting that perceptual awareness does not depend on a read-out by high order cognitive-access mechanisms. Rather, it may emerge internally, through a cooperative coding dynamics, whereby each neuron simultaneously represents and reads-out the perceptual awareness state.

The target article discusses various aspects of the relationship between the sympathetic system and pain. To this end, the patients under study are divided into three groups. In the first group, called “reflex sympathetic dystrophy” (RSD), the syndrome can be characterized by a triad of autonomic, motor, and sensory symptoms, which occur in a distally generalized distribution. The pain is typically felt deeply and diffusely, has an orthostatic component, and is suppressed by the ischemia test. Under those circumstances, the pain is likely to respond to sympatholytic interventions. In a second group, called “sympathetically maintained pain” (SMP) syndrome, the principal symptoms are spontaneous pain, which is felt superficially and has no orthostatic component, and allodynia. These symptoms, typically confined to the zone of a lesioned nerve, may also be relieved by sympathetic blocks. Since the characteristics of the pain differ between RSD and SMP, the underlying kind of sympathetic–sensory coupling may also vary between these cases. A very small third group of patients exhibits symptoms of both RSD and SMP. The dependence or independence of pain on sympathetic function reported in most published studies seems to be questionable because the degree of technical success of the block remains uncertain. Therefore, pain should not be reported as sympathetic function independent until the criteria for a complete sympathetic block have been established and satisfied.

We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicality. Instead, the commentators generally support our more inclusive proposal that social bonding and credible signaling mechanisms complement one another in explaining cooperation within and competition between groups in a coevolutionary framework (albeit with some confusion regarding terminologies such as “byproduct” and “exaptation”). We discuss the proposed criticisms and extensions, with a focus on moving beyond adaptation/byproduct dichotomies and toward testing of cross-species, cross-cultural, and other empirical predictions.

The target article is consistent with seeing languages as semiotically heterogenous, using categorial, depictive, and analogic semiotic signs. “Gesture,” used in the target article, is shown to be vague and not useful. Kendon's view, criticised in the target, is restated. His proposal for comparative semiotic analyses of how visible bodily action is used in utterance production is reexplained.

To understand why autistic people are misperceived in the way Jaswal & Akhtar suggest, we should embrace concepts like the “double empathy problem” and camouflaging and recognize the negative consequences these have for mental health in autism. Moreover, we need to value expertise from experience so that autistic people have a voice and indeed a stake in research into autism.

The authors show that some long-standing confusions and problems can be avoided by thinking of perception in terms of sensorimotor contingencies, a close kin to my heterophenomenological approach (Dennett 1991). However, their claim that subjects do not have any commitments about the resolution of their visual fields is belied by the surprise routinely expressed by subjects when this is demonstrated to them.