Social and personality psychologists have accumulated an enormous corpus of data documenting interrelationships between threat processes and ideological modes of cognition. Unfortunately, these important findings are embedded in a formidably dense and contested patchwork of theories. Indeed, the four chapters making up this section highlight only a subset of the diverse, productive, yet largely disconnected theoretical approaches that have grown around worldview defense (i.e., the intensification of ideological adherence upon detection of a threat). Consider the following selection of perspectives posited to account for the relationship between threat detection and worldview defense (Table 1): Insert Table 1 about here That’s a lot of parallel theories. Perhaps surprisingly, we will argue that it is not the proliferation of proposed threat management systems that poses the greatest concern. Rather, the deeper problem is the murkiness surrounding how any of these theories might be meta-theoretically integrated, and what sort of evidence is necessary to compel retaining a theory rather than abandoning it as redundant. Can multiple accounts be usefully complementary, or is there one underlying threat

■ Functional MRI studies report insular activations across a wide range of tasks involving affective, sensory, and motor processing, but also during tasks of high-level perception, attention, and control. Although insular cortical activations are often reported in the literature, the diverse functional roles of this region are still not well understood. We used a meta-analytic approach to analyze the coactivation profiles of insular subdivisions—dorsal anterior, ventral anterior, and posterior insula—across fMRI studies in terms of multiple task domains including emotion, memory, attention, and reasoning. We found extensive coactivation of each insular subdivision, with substantial overlap between coactivation partners for each subdivision. Functional fingerprint analyses revealed that all subdivisions cooperated with a functionally di-verse set of regions. Graph-theoretical analyses revealed that the dorsal anterior insula was a highly “central ” structure in the co-activation network. Furthermore, analysis of the studies that acti-vate the insular cortex itself showed that the right dorsal anterior insula was a particularly “diverse ” structure in that it was likely to be active across multiple task domains. These results highlight the nuanced functional profiles of insular subdivisions and are con-sistent with recent work suggesting that the dorsal anterior insula can be considered a critical functional hub in the human brain. ■