Playing video games does not turn children into deranged, blood-thirsty super-killers, according to a new book by a pair of Harvard researchers. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, detail their views in Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, which came out last month and promises to reshape the debate on the effects of video games on kids.

The pair reached that conclusion after conducting a two-year study of more than 1,200 middle-school children about their attitudes towards video games. It was a different approach than most other studies, which have focused on laboratory experiments that attempt to use actions like ringing a loud buzzer as a measure of aggression. They found that playing video games was a near-universal activity among children, and was often intensely social.

Source: Reuters