Use deduction: Reading mind in films & Cambridge mindreading

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I just took these tests ( Reading mind in films, Cambridge mindreading face-voice part 1 and 2) on aspietests.org and found I was able through a process of elimination and deduction to guess the right answers enough to score borderline or in some cases even higher than an average NT.

For example based on the words spoken (not how they were spoken) like "oh please can I..." which obviously must be appealing when the other choices are subdued, insincere etc.

In the selection of answers available of which almost always 2 were way off leaving me a 50/50 chance of guessing right.

More than once my answer (if it was a write in answer instead of multiple choice) was the opposite of the emotions described in the answer options but there was an answer there that was the direct opposite so I picked that one.

Is this test supposed to be a test of real time intuitive understanding of emotions, or your ability to go through a concious deductive process?

If the former it fails, if the latter ok, but how does that help someone get diagnosed in adulthood after a lifetime of practicing deduction?

Am I missing something? Or are these tests not really very accurate except in extreme cases?

On the other hand, not having a problem in this area is a plus

The scores of autistics and NTs are on these types of tests overlap a lot, so scoring high doesn't mean you are not autistic. In some studies of HFA, scores are correlated with IQ and not autism severity. These explicit tests are not a measure of abilities in real-world interaction, which requires implicit processes in social cognition, many of which operate unconsciously for NTs, but perhaps not for autistics.

In real situations, the number of people, how fast they are changing topics, your tiredness, your familiarity of their usual communication patterns, lots of things -- can affect one's speed in cognitively figuring their perspectives out and successfully "mind reading". With particular people, it can improve once you've interacted with them a lot. It took me a long time to understand this, plus finally reading things from people in the autistic community.

So, I'd agree that these tests really don't work, the designers aren't listening to autistics maybe, not sure. Probably the tests do work for people who for various reasons haven't been able to develop the more cognitive approach (yet).

I find the absolute worst social situations to be fast-moving, casual conversations of many neurotypicals where they are really relaxed and get happier and more relaxed and boisterous. I think they might shut their cognition off and really go into that intuitive interaction thing, whatever it is. They interrupt each other, they know when they can speak, several might talk at once and they're ok with it (though not other times, I guess I just learn to blanketly not do that.) I am always too slow in those cases, I get lost really fast, my brain gets fried, and I can't say a thing after maybe 15 minutes but depends. Meetings are much easier for me if I like the group, the NTs might be folllowing rules more then. I think I process fast now, lots of practice, but it's still much slower in some contexts, I fry out, almost like I'm using high-energy software and they have dedicated low-energy-use hardware. Speaking as a computer geek.

These tests arent really useful. The reading mind in films one has 12.5 as average for male ASD & 12.8 for male NT. Thats 0.3 difference in diagnosed autistic/aspergers and your average NT dude with ASD people also beeing over 25% faster than the NT group. The only correlation with the film test i see is females in their groups are a little bit better than males in general, and scores correlate with time used..

Peace
TK