Eye expression test by Simon Baron Cohen

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I got 23, but some of that score is probably just being good at multiple choice tests

I just did the aspergers test on the same site and got a score of 34 which is close to the score people with aspergers generally get.

I haven't been diagnosed with aspergers but I think I fit into the spectrum somewhere. I find it all very confusing, I'm 23 and when I speak about it to people I know they tell me I can't be as my school would have picked it up?

I actually had the complete opposite problem with the test. For one thing, quite a few of them seemed really fake, and I started trying to read emotions below that. Then, I had to keep imagine them moving, in front of me...nothing was really helping. I had to think very 'simply,' more at face value, to get the score I did, which seemed to do the trick.

I broke the first test mentioned here, had to take the java version for it to display the score..

9

Whee.. statistically, random guessing would give similar results (and I had to guess on most).

Maybe its because I have prosopagnosia as well but I couldn't see anything but people looking around and squinting.

I scored 29.

I scored 22 the first time I took it, weeks earlier.

31. mostly process of elimination (only had to eliminate 3, so it seemed easy compared to eliminating dozens )

I am doig very badly on these tests today! I only scored 4! Ah well.

Interesting point! I''m NT and only got 26 as opposed to your rather impressive 35. The thing is, I have no practice doing this. I don't spend time decoding expressions from pictures nor do I study my own expression in the mirror. I might be better at this if I lived in a country where I got practice from conversing with women in burkas. But just the eyes in just a photo is too little information. When I guess at peoples' emotions I'm looking at their entire face and often at their hands and body too (when this is possible).

Yeah I got 29 but most of the ones I got wrong were pretty majorly opposite from what I thought and would definitely cause problems in a social setting in fact my mind managed to find a few nasty little example memories for most.

Your score: 29

9: preoccupied (thought it was annoyed)
12: sceptical (embarrassed)
17: doubtful (affectionate)
19: tentative (arrogant)
23: defiant (curious)
24: pensive (irritated)
31: confident (joking)

29. I'm blogging about it.

It would be nice to see a more extensive study of the score distributions for this kind of test. My hypothesis is that the score distribution for NT's will be more clustered around a specific value whereas the AS scores will be more widely distributed. In other words someone with AS is more statistically more likely to score very low but a large number also score normal or above normal.

I did this once before, and I think I got a 23 or something. Not too bad. However, I looked at the eyes and decided what the emotion was before looking at the choices, and then, very often, found that my word wasn't there, so I had to just pick something else that I didn't necessarily think was right.


On one of them, I kept thinking, "Brigit Bardot." (It might have been Cheryl Tiegs or Christie Brinkley, though.)

I was very much aware of these people being professional actors and models. Who decided the "correct" answers? These people weren't "feeling" anything. They were doing their job. There were one or two craggy old guys squinting off into the distance. Maybe the "emotion" was, "It sure is bright out here." Or, "This is my rugged, masculine face. It sure is great to make so much money being photogenic."

Your score: 29

I think you're correct! AS/HFA may not all score the same. I found a peer-review journal article from Simon Baron-Cohen's website. It listed the standard deviations for both the AS/HFA and the control groups, and the AS/HFA group has more deviation on the eye test. One thing I found interesting, the standard deviations for the Autism Quotient test is about the same in all the groups, but the SD for the Eyes Test is greater in the AS/HFA group.

Because of my curiosity, I went to http://autismresearchcentre.com/tests/e ... _adult.asp , clicked "The 'Reading the mind in the eyes' test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning autism" and found a distribution on page 245.

If you're interested more about those on the spectrum recognizing emotional states, there are more downloadable peer review studies on that webpage.

There's also an issue with using means to represent "typical" scores when you're dealing with a non-Gaussian distribution. The distribution of scores on the eye-test is definitely non-Gaussian because of the hard upper limit on possible scores. Because it's impossible to score higher than 36 you're going to get a lot more people scoring above the mean than people scoring below the mean. Just a few low scores can really drag the mean down. Therefore the AS group can have a lower mean just because of the increased variance.

I think there's a statistically flaw in making claims that the AS group has more trouble reading eyes overall based on a study like this just because the AS group has so much more variance than the control group.

Yes, that's the test. Given the leisure to work things out intellectually, aspies don't do badly. Where we fail is in the realtime heat of the moment.