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"It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of "The Language Instinct," addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future?"

"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