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What would be the moral implications of the capacity for suicide in nonhuman animals? Humans can be helped to end their lives if they no longer find them bearable. Should captive animals not be given the same possibility?

King's new book is a wonderful collection of diverse anecdotes illustrating the variety of animal practices that are convincing illustrations of grief. Those who want scientific arguments for that conclusion should, however, read elsewhere.

The evidence that exposure to media violence causes later aggression derives largely from observational (nonexperimental) studies augmented by short-term experimental studies. The authors review some of the difficulties in causal inference from observational, longitudinal data; examine the extent to which these seem relevant to the empirical work on exposure to televised violence published to date; and present a reanalysis of data from an especially influential study to address one of the more serious limitations of existing analyses. They conclude that the data give evidence that there is likely, although not certainly, a causal connection between exposure to televised violence and adult aggression. The authors close with a brief discussion of policy interventions designed to reduce exposure to violent TV.

AbstractThe conditional intervention principle is a formal principle that relates patterns of interventions and outcomes to causal structure. It is a central assumption of experimental design and the causal Bayes net formalism. Two studies suggest that preschoolers can use the conditional intervention principle to distinguish causal chains, common cause and interactive causal structures even in the absence of differential spatiotemporal cues and specific mechanism knowledge. Children were also able to use knowledge of causal structure to predict the patterns of evidence that would result from interventions. A third study suggests that children's spontaneous play can generate evidence that would support such accurate causal learning.