baron-cohen

• autism spectrum

  social communication, social interaction, social imagination
• social communication

  difficulty understanding jokes, difficulty understanding non-verbal communication e.g. facial expressions, hand gestures
• social interaction

  avoidance of eye contact, difficulty making lasting friendships
• social imagination


  difficulty dealing with new or unusual situations, inability to emphasise with the feelings of others
• theory of mind


  people's ability to understand that other people have mental states - beliefs, desires, intentions and perspectives - which differ from our own
• sally-anne test


  sally has a basket, anne has a box. sally has a marble, she puts the marble in her basket. sally goes for a walk. anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in her box. now sally comes back and wants to play with her marble. where will sally look for her marble?
• test for adults


  the eyes task
• aim


  to test whether high-functioning adults with autistic spectrum disorders struggle to identify emotions from photographs of eyes
• hypothesis


  that adults with Asperger Syndrome (autism) can't interpret states of mind from 'reading eyes'
• method


  quasi experiment, independent measure design
• autism group


  13 men and 3 women of normal intelligence with a diagnosis of autism

  volunteer sample recruited through doctors and in response to an advert in the National Autistic Society's magazine
• control group


  25 men and 25 women with no autism diagnosis

  no IQ test but assumed to all be of normal intelligence

  selected randomly from the subject panel held in the university department
• tourette's syndrome group


  8 men and 2 women with tourettes

  recruited from a referral centre in london
• why was tourettes group also used?

  autism and tourette's are developmental disorders. both neurological disorders associated with abnormalities in the front of the brain, if theory of mind is specific to autism as opposed to childhood disrupted psychological conditions, autism group would be expected to do worse on the eyes task
• 25 photos of eyes - each 15cm x 10cm black and white
• each photo was shown for 3 seconds
• forced choice question - closed question, target (correct answer presented, randomised left and right) and foil (answer that would try to get someone to say the wrong answer) categories


  examples

  • attraction or worried
  • friendly or hostile
  • calm or anxious
• tested individually in a quiet room
• 4 judges generated the words. the eyes were shown to a panel of 8 adults who did not know there was a 'right or wrong' answer, there was 100% agreement with the target emotion
• 2 control tasks

  1. gender identification - all participants asked to identify the gender of each of the 25 eye photos
  2. basic emotion task - all participants asked to identify the emotion in full face photos: happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprise, disgust (Ekman categories)
• findings


  mean:

  • autistic - 16.3
  • normal - 20.3
  • tourettes - 20.4
• conclusion


  evidence of subtle 'mind reading' deficits in intelligent adults on the autistic spectrum

  eye task is a 'pure theory of mind test' because there is no context
• Happe's strange stories


  series of strange stories that allow you to take other people's perspectives/views

  concurrent validity - check that the eyes task measures what its supposed to by measuring Happe's strange stories, comparing both tests and their findings
• research method - strength

  carried out in a controlled setting, environmental conditions were well controlled
• research method - weakness

  • low ecological validity as judging emotions from eyes is different to faces
  • three naturally occurring groups were being compared meaning that groups might not have been well-matched for all the relevant variables
  • control group without a diagnosis weren't vigorously tested to make sure that they're comparable
• sample - weakness

  • small sample size makes it hard to assume it's a representative group of adults with autism, generalisability is a problem
  • volunteer sample are one of the less representative sampling methods
• data - strength

  • quantitative data - easy comparison of the conditions, clearly shows that theory of mind is worse in the autism group
• data - weakness

  • no opportunity for participants to comment on what they experienced when they looked at the eyes or on what they found difficult about the task
• ethics - strengths

  • participants were volunteers
  • not deceived
  • experienced no distress beyond that which they could expect in their daily lives
• reliability - strength

  • internal reliability of procedure was good - shown same pictures of the same size (15cm x 10cm) for the same time (3 seconds) under the same conditions with standard instructions
  • external reliability also good - straightforward to replicate
• reliability - weakness

  • no testing of external reliability was reported in the paper
• validity - strength

  • test for validity included through the Strange Stories task which supported validity of the Eyes task
• validity - weakness

  • low ecological validity - eyes task carried out under controlled conditions, experience of judging emotion by looking at an isolated pair of eyes is difference from real life
• practical applications

  • adults with autism have problems when it comes to reading emotions in faces. can open up practical ways in helping those manage their condition such as teaching people on the spectrum to make use of different visual cues to judge emotion or teach those interacting with people on the spectrum to give clear visual and verbal cues to signal what they are feeling
• how does this link to the area

  • understanding differences - investigating the differences between people based on their individual dispositional characteristics
  • baron-cohen investigated the differences between people with autism, tourettes and those with neither and found that people with autism had a social impairment through the eyes task