The author presents a comprehensive study on the prevalence, presentation, and motivation of the "ultimate coercive sanction": capital punishment, or the "death penalty". He begins by examining capital punishment across all 53 cultures for which data was present in the Probability Sample Files, and finds that capital punishment is overwhelmingly present. After discerning some general trends, the author examines how capital punishment presents itself across different kinds of political systems, and uses the results to voice support for various theories on why the capital punishment is practiced. The study concludes by stating that the capital punishment may be something that human society may never be truly rid of, but greater societal stability may be able to reduce its prevalence.

The present research investigates the theory of universality in form and function in human song in a sample of people from 60 countries listening to music from 86 mainly small-scale societies. The aims are to document whether people 1) identify the social function of a song solely on form, 2) demonstrate form-function inferences, 3) use contextual aspects to distinguish song functions, and 4) use musical features to differentiate song functions. The authors claim support for the universal perception of song form-function in music listeners.

In this study, the author explores different pathways to the emergence of clothing outside of thermoregulation, with a focus on the use of clothing for disguise or concealment. He finds disguises in 8 out of 10 sampled societies, proposing that attempts at disguise or concealment is one possible pathway to the cultural evolution of clothing. He also finds clothing used for modesty and body armor purposes.

The present study explores the cognitive and affective attitudes towards owls in cold-climate and warm-climate societies. In addition, a few hypotheses were tested. Specifically, the research question asks which societies would have greater owl ethnozoological knowledge, functional usage, conception of owls in positive magico-religious terms, and positive supernaturalistic interpretations of owls' behaviors and characteristics. The results offer support for the initial predictions with the exception that cold-climate societies do not have more positive magico-religious conceptions of owls than warm-climate societies.

This study examines the variability of siestas across cultures and considers how factors including climate, subsistence type, and disease susceptability relate to the presence or absence of siestas. The author finds a significant relationship between siestas and the presence of malaria.

Using 57 cultures from the Human Relations Area Files database, this paper examines the function and effectiveness of the belief of punitive ancestors in small-scale societies. The authors found that belief in dangerous ancestral entities is widespread and common and that harm is preventable through ritualized mortuary practices. The authors concluded that the fear of ancestral spirits did not promote social cooperation or inhibit self-interest behavior, contrary to the supernatural punishment hypothesis.

This study examines the relationship between existence of status hierarchies and the level of expense on burials. The aim is to assess the archaeological assumption that more expenditure on burials reflects elite statuses in society. Author concludes that competition is a more direct predictor of burial type than status hierarchy. Implications for archaeology are discussed.

This book examines naming practices cross-culturally. The author posits that naming practices help to both reflect and create conceptions of personal identity. Several correlations between name meanings and practices and various sociocultural variables are presented.

Authors test three explanations as to why bloodletting is such a near-universal therapeutic cultural practice in "the west." Using references from HRAF's database which are then re-coded for colocalization, practitioner, and cultural explanation, they find that bloodletting is practiced therapeutically by many unrelated cultures worldwide; it is heterogeneous in both form and cultural significance across the globe while still fairly ubiquitous in general. Authors posit that the widespread propensity toward bloodletting in human populations is explained by the universality of affecting/affected cognitive mechanisms. After analyzing cultural data in eHRAF, authors incorporated experiments and modeling that further supported this conclusion.

Researchers coded 473 texts from 53 cultures on suicidal behavior in the Probability Sample Files looking for evidence to support a new theoretical framework called the Costly Apology Model (signaling "I am genuinely remorseful for my actions, and you can trust that I will not do it again," (7)) to explain suicidal behavior that occurs after someone violates one or more social norms. This is theorized to be distinct behavior from the Bargaining Model (signaling "My fitness is genuinely being threatened, and I need your support." (7)) which could explain suicidal behavior after someone suffers harm from another, and from the Inclusive Fitness Model, where suicide occurs as a fitness behavior when an individual cannot reproduce or has a high cost to the fitness of their kin. .