Reading the mind in the eyes test

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Hi everyone,

I'm wondering whether anyone here has been officially diagnosed and scored high on this test?
I'm in the midst of my diagnostic assessment and felt quite positive that I'd be getting an AS diagnosis until I scored high on this one...

Thanks, Zel.

For the record, I'm diagnosed with Aspergers and I scored a 13

I think I've scored higher in the past, but I find the test amazingly irritating because they're just eyes and without context none of the possible answers make sense.

Thanks for replies.

You can search for the thread with results (there is one) and find ones with the diagnosis

I scored 34, and I am diagnosed. I was that I didn't get a purrrfect score, but it got boring towards the end, so I started to rush through it.

The psych and I both thought that good performance on the RMET does not equal ability to automatically read the mind in the eyes or anywhere else in real life interactions. I told the psych that I thought very little about what was going on in other people's minds during real life interactions, and I did not get any meanings beyond what they told me directly. She agreed that this was normal in autism and also that it was obvious that I did not get unspoken meanings and did not make the standard social interpretations. I read a social cognition study comparing autistics, schizophrenics, and NTs using various measures, one of them being the RMET. There was no difference amongst the three groups. Instead, a correlation was found between RMET performance and IQ, and the study concluded that the RMET was not ready as a definitive test for autism. There was only a small blurb on the RMET, so they did not eggsplore this issue much beyond the results.

31
I missed two interested gazes though
Some of them came intuitively alright, but there were some I had to apply some theorizing, and I don't think I'd have time for that in a real social interaction.

I'm going to create a reading the mind in the sides of the face test. You get both sides of the face from the corners of the eyes to the ears. I bet I would do well on this test too, if I were not the one who is going to create this test.

It just goes to show that using a test to demonstrate a statistical correlation based on averages is not the same as using a test to make a diagnosis.

One problem is the test has a vocabulary component so people with a lower verbal IQ may not understand the meanings of the words given in the multiple choice even if they have an intuitive idea of the "feeling" that's being expressed. It's obviously much easier to guess if you have enough vocabulary to rule out certain choices.

I do think some mirror-neuron or "imaginary mimicking" of expressions in the eyes is used in this kind of test. It seems likely that some people on the spectrum don't really lack this skill but just choose not to employ it instinctively in real-life situations because they find eye-contact uncomfortable or may block out processing of facial expressions in order to think.

I scored 33 on that test some time in the past.

I did even better on a similar test during which I was handed photos and asked to identify the facial expressions and body language of the people on them. It was however pretty easy because the photo also covered the situation the people were in.

I cannot read people's expressions in real life though (except for a few, see below). I don't even try and waste my energy on it because it wouldn't work anyway with them moving around and moving on and all.

The few I understand are laughs, tears and several kinds of (obvious) smiles. I guess that's something, it could be worse after all.

This test can be done well on non-intuitively, which was the way that I did it. I don't know what percentage of NTs do it intuitively and quickly, and what percentage of autistics do the same, but I did it through analysis and process-of-elimination and not as fast as intuitive processing in real-time, comparing tested eye regions to eggsamples of eye regions that I remembered seeing from TV while characters were eggspressing certain states of mind. Almost all of my comparisons were from TV and photos, almost none from real-life interactions in which I had participated. All the eggspressions on the test questions seemed to be acted as well, not eggsacly natural. And there is the vocabulary component too. It could be that NTs who do well use intuitive processing, resulting in a spectrum of abilities for NTs, while autistics who do well use other compensatory mechanism which cannot be so effectively used in real-time in the absence of intuitive processing. Or eberryone uses a combination of both, and only one works well in real-time. In real-time, a lot of my attention is elsewhere, and that is not entirely under my control.