The Eye-Emotion recognition test

Post Reply New Topic

I recently looked at the Cambridge University Autism Eye Recognition test, which basically involves literally looking at someone's eyes, and trying to judge what emotion they are conveying.

I then looked at a paper which compared the results of those with Autism with those of the NT's.
Fascinatingly, Autistics actually outscored NT's in recognising expressions where the person was 'in thought' or 'pre-occupied'.
But when eyes were conveying emotion like ''Excited'' or ''Distrustful'', the people with Autism scored less, understandably.

So this leads me to concluded that Autistics or Aspies aren't necessarily impaired in reading facial expressions OVERALL, but are merely limited to understanding expressions that are involved purely with cognition.


Funnily enough, it seems people with ADHD are the complete opposite. They may be more switched on by faces that convey emotion, but hopeless with those that involve cognition.

Statistical artifacts to consider:
Instead of autistics (or adhd) being better in some expressions and worse in others, it's also possible that autistics are simply more likely to think that someone is thinking, and less likely to think that he's excited etc. So when the person actually happens to be thinking, they are more likely to get it right, and less likely when the person is excited or distrustful. To see if a group is better or worse at determining whether a person makes a certain expression, we not only have to consider how often they get it wrong when the person actually makes that expression, but also how often they nominate that expression while the person doesn't actually have that expression.

I posted about this test on another Aspergers forum recently. I do well on it, personally. I do not think it is a particularly useful test as it is done under totally different circumstances to those you would face in day to day life, where you are not given 4 quite dissimilar options, time to think and probably little in the way of distraction. Also, the expressions are quite extreme in these tests, with eyebrows used to great effect. The specialist who diagnosed my agreed with this and also believes that test to be pretty much invalid.

What was the name of the paper?

I don't do well on the test.
I never put a lot of faith into reading outward expressions.
People so commonly fake their expressions for the purpose of manipulation.

A good point. Well observed.

Consider this. What if aspies do read expressions subconsciously about the same as NTs do, but their conscious logical thought process simply rejects the information so that it doesn't factor into their thinking & behaviors ?

This comes to mind because the filtering out of information from the subconscious is something I observe again and again with ASD.

Can you give some examples?

Absolutely amazed I got 24 out of 36, considering I felt like I was making pure guesses at the vast majority of them.

I can't really tell the emotional state of a person by his/her facial expression--unless it's at least somewhat blatant. I could tell if someone is crying, obviously (sometimes, though LOL....women cry from "happiness." I've never heard of a man who does that). I can't tell if someone is being ironic via a facial expression, though.

Blunted and delayed affect, - filtering of emotions.
Anhedonia.
Choosing reason over intuition.

Asynchronous development is another.
This is where the intellect far outpaces emotional development.