Baron and Cohen (1997)

• Aim?

  • to see whether properly with ASD lack a theory of mind
  • And to see if they are unable to understand basic emotions
• method?

  • lab experiment
  • quasi
• Asperger’s + HFA participants?

  • 4 HFA
  • 12 Asperger’s
  • 13 male, 3 female
  • (16)
• clinically normal participants?

  • 50
  • 25/25 gender split
  • control group
• Tourette’s participants?

  • 10
  • 8 male, 2 female
• how were participants selected?

  • self-select - clinically normal magazines
  • self-select- ASD advert
  • opportunity - Tourette’s and ASD
• how many tasks?

  4
• how is there concurrent validity?

  • 4 tasks - counterbalanced
• Task 1?

  • basic emotions taso
  • 6 basic emotions chosen, 2 displayed on faces
  • closed questions
• Task 2?

  • eyes task
  • 25 pictures in black and white of eyes - had to recognise the emotions of the eyes
  • 4 researchers chose eyes and emotions
  • another 4 researchers doubled checked the emotions to agree - (reliability)
• Task 3?

  • gender recognition task
  • same 25 photos were used
• Task 4?

  • strange stories task
  • mentalistic: joke, white lies, irony, pretend, forgetting, misunderstanding, speech
  • physical: still hard to understand even without autism
• Results from eye test? /25

  • clinically normal = 20.3
  • Tourette’s = 20.4
  • ASD = 16.3 - (significant difference)
• results from emotions task?

  • no significant differences
• results from gender recognition task?

  • no significant differences
• results from strange stories task?

  • clinically normal = few errors
  • tourette’s = no errors
  • ASD = lot’s of errors
• conclusions?

  • autistic people lack a theory of mind
  • autistic people struggled with the tasks that required the theory of mind
  • autistic people don’t look at peoples eyes and don’t make eye contact - low score on eye task
• who analysed the results?

  • Jolliffe (1997)