Week 3 9/7/12

This week in Psychology I watched a documentary on the brain. I learned the hard intensive life of a potential Navy Seal. They are faced with tons of psychologically difficult tests, such as how they act in the face of fear, and how they can get themselves out of the most difficult test. one example is being underwater for 20 minutes with only 10 minutes of oxygen. Then the instructor tested them by tangling the oxygen tubes. We also learned about psychopaths with an antisocial personality. Despite the name, these people are social, but have no empathy. They like to cheat people out of anything and have no remorse. One out of 100 people have been diagnosed with this disorder. A type of psychopath is a serial killer and less than 1% of the population. When questioned if they felt remorse, they said no. 300 inmates got tested to see how they deal with failure; most of them had test results where there was no activity in the emotionail part of the brain when they failed. Studies show that the part in our brain that controls our empathy and emotion is normal size for anyone else, but for psychopaths theirs is 17% smaller then normal people, so they are less sympathetic in nature.