Baron-Cohen

• Baron-Cohen was inspired by previous research of autism in children such as the Sally Anne and the Happe's strange story test. In particular he was interesting in Theory of Mind, the idea that we can detect and empathise with the emotions of others based off the emotions they portray.
• The belief was that autistic people struggle with social interaction and the interpretation of emotions. Baron-Cohen wanted to develop a more advanced theory of mind test for adults to see the difference of theory of mind between autistic adults, adults with Tourette's and neurotypical adults.
• Baron-Cohen aimed to develop an advanced test for the theory of mind, the Eyes test, in order to compare autism with Neurotypical and Tourette's.
• He studied 16 autistic adults, 10 adults with Tourette's syndrome and 50 neurotypical adults (half men, half women).
• This was a quasi experiment as the independent variable was not manipulated, it tool place in a controlled lab at Cambridge University. The dependent variable was their score out of 25 on the eyes task. It was independent measures and a snapshot study.
• Procedure:

  • The participants were tested alone and had to complete 4 tasks,
  • 2 control tasks were basic emotion recognition task and the gender recognition task to control to for individual differences of basic recognition,
  • The tasks were done in random order to prevent order effects,
  • The eyes task consisted of 25 pictures of black and white pictures of eyes all shown for the same amount of time, the participants had to choose between 2 words in pairs to best describe the emotions they eyes were showing,
  • The correct answers were decided by a panel of unbiased men and women.
• The autistic and the Tourette's group also did the Happe's strange stories task which involved a series of fictional stories where the participants had to describe the main characters emotions or intentions. This was done to check for concurrent validity between the results of the eye's task.
• The mean scores on the eyes task was significantly lower for the autistic group (16.3) than the Tourette's group (20.4) and Neurotypical group (20.3).

  There was no significant differences on the scores on the control tasks.
• Baron Cohen concluded that, even though Tourette's is a similar behavioural disorder, a lack of theory of mind is unique to autism, illustrating that autism is a distinct disorder. This explains their social impairments and anxieties about interaction.