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Mind in the Eyes

7 years ago550 words

Here's an interesting test - supposedly of social intelligence - where you have to determine the 'correct' emotion from a pair of isolated eyes. How well do you perform?

Here's a link to an online version of the test: [LINK]

I got a score of 30 out of 36, which it says is better than or equal to 82% of all participants (that is, I'm in the 82nd percentile).

Curious to see whether I could do better, I redid it, and got 32 (it didn't tell me what percentile that was; it just said the average score was 26).

There's a degree of disappointment there, since I wish that I'd got a perfect score... but it's also not a bad score - it's above average - which goes towards ruling out the suggestion that I have some kind of autism spectrum disorder that means I struggle to recognise social cues, as some people have suggested simply because the leap from social difficulties to assumed autism is an easy one to make.

∞ Here's a study ∞ about it, comparing scores between people with autism and 'normal' people; those with autism performed more poorly, of course.

I suspect that errors that I made myself were at least in part due to the difficulty in transforming the instant feeling of the emotion that I got into one of the four sometimes rather obtuse word choices, many of which aren't typically or commonly used for emotional states at all, really. Entirely different mental processes are involved in detecting and responding to facial expressions and actually verbally describing the subtle impression that you got. There were some where I felt that none of the words fit with the impression I was getting.

I also noticed that the overwhelming majority of my word choices corresponded to negative emotions; I know there's some bias towards perceiving negative states (especially accusatory or disapproving ones) in people with conditions like social anxiety and/or depression.

I'm somewhat reluctant to post about this because it's often the case that people who try it and score well are going to post their results, while those who did poorly are going to keep theirs to themselves... probably. So it looks like everyone is doing well overall. I remember posting about a similar thing (or maybe it was even the same one? I can't remember) a few years ago, and someone rather smugly posted that he got a perfect score, which just made me feel defective by comparison... despite scoring above average, as I have here.

But I suppose I'm posting mostly because I know that some people probably do assume that my difficulties stem from some kind of autism condition, which I really don't think is the case, and things like this help back up my thoughts so it seems less like I'm just in denial!

It is notable though that it's not like people with autism conditions get a score of zero. In the study I linked to, the average isn't much lower than the 'normal' average (though it is 'significantly' lower), and the standard deviation is wider too, meaning that some people with autism actually did really well on the test.

So I suppose it hardly 'proves' anything. Still, maybe it's slightly interesting, at least.