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A number of very important challenges to the separation distress hypothesis of depression were discussed, clarified, and linked to various strands of existing literature. Foremost among those is the critical challenge to define a more comprehensive set of clinical precipitants, and the possibility that depression may have two prototype elicitors - social defeat and social loss, with hugely overlapping neurobiology, and currently inadequate differentiation in terms of biomarkers and fundamental neurobiology. The possibility of synergism versus exclusionary arguments around about various evolutionary and traditional psychiatric perspectives was advocated. Additional and relevant considerations around mammalian PLAY as an opponent process to depression, and the challenges posed by social constructivist views of emotion were also explored, as these were both neglected in the target article. Social constructivist views and prototype emotion theory are not incompatible; how cognition extensions of prototype ‘elicitors,’ as well as cognized versions of classic prototype affective behaviors might operate is also discussed. There is no way to defend social constructivist views of emotion in animals, and the enormous continuity - from subcortical architectures, neuromodulators and behavioral homologues - argues loudly against any assumption of a fundamental discontinuity between mammalian and human affective endowment.