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"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

"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?"

"Well, almost official, as results of a unique study show that people not programmes affect behaviour. Television is bad for us. It corrodes the moral fabric of society and corrupts our children with relentless images of violence. Well, that's what the proponents of increased television regulation - politicians, social campaigners and certain elements of the media- would like us to believe. Yet events on one of the world's most remote inhabited islands tell a different and fascinating story, one which is less palatable to those who seek an convenient scapegoat for the ills of modern society. Five years ago, television arrived on St Helena, in the South Atlantic. Previously, the inhabitants of this isolated British sovereignty, to which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled, had no access to broadcast television. Amid the excitement of its arrival, there was concern that exposure to television would have a detrimental impact on the island's children, previously shown to be among the best behaved in the world. This event provided researchers with a rare opportunity to examine the effects of television in a real-life setting both before and after its arrival. Previous research had mostly relied on studies in artificial laboratory conditions. Findings have been contradictory, with some studies providing conclusive evidence of links between television viewing and antisocial behaviour, others claiming beneficial effects and some denying any links at all. What all these studies had in common was that they lacked real life. The opportunity to gather pre- and post-TV-watching data using a whole population (rather than samples) of children was gratefully seized by myself and colleagues; here was a real chance toput television on trial. "

"A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play. The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect. "For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home," said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. "These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior." For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period. Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task. The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members s