Group items tagged

"A MOTHER sits in a playroom with her young son. The phone rings. When she picks it up, a researcher watching through a two-way mirror asks her to look into her son's eyes and ''show him, in the way that feels most natural for you, that you love him''. The mother is doing her best to connect, but this little boy won't return her gaze. He looks at her mouth, where the words are coming from, but it's as if he can't understand what she means. Advertisement: Story continues below Robert Thompson and Jon Venables killed UK toddler James Bulger. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables killed UK toddler James Bulger. Mark Dadds says some children literally cannot see the love in their mother's eyes. Professor Dadds, a parenting expert from the University of New South Wales, has just published results of his work in the British Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology that suggest the ability to make eye contact is vital in learning how to love other people. For the past five years, he has been working with children referred to his Sydney clinic for sustained rages, continual aggression, calculated violence and, occasionally, cruelty to animals. These are children with some of the worst behavioural problems, who score highly for ''callous, unemotional'' traits. In his studies in both Sydney and London, it was these children who did not meet their mother's gaze, even when told they were loved. People marvel at the resilience of children who overcome appalling family backgrounds to make good lives. We understand when childhood trauma sends a child off the rails. But we also have to accept that even good parents can have mean children - how else to explain families where only one child seems to be callous and unemotional, while the siblings are not? Dadds distinguishes between children who are emotionally ''hot'' - those who lash out at the world - and the much smaller subset of ''cold'' children - the ones who don't react emotionally, don't car

"Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend's house, past the 6 p.m. curfew. The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist's desk nearly every day. He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater. Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world's most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science. Kahneman doesn't actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman's research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it. I'd like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results. Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that w