Emotions
1. What emotions do you think these cartoons are showing?
3. Now draw faces for the following
2. What are the key features emotions:
of the face that we use to • amazed
show emotion? • confused
• fearful
Eyes task
Which of the two emotions do you
think each person is feeling?
Surprised or indifferent?
Angry or pleased?
Calm or fearful?
Cheerful or sad?
Happy or sad?
Disgusted or delighted?
Surprised Angry Fearful
Sad Happy Disgusted
Another advanced test of
theory of mind: evidence from
very high functioning adults
with autism or Asperger
syndrome
Simon Baron-Cohen, Joliffe,
Mortimore, and Robertson
Background
Theory of mind
‘Theory of mind is being able to put yourself in
somebody else's shoes, being able to imagine
what's going on in his or her mind.’
Baron-Cohen
(See ‘Websites’, p. ii)
Ability to do this generally appears at the end of
the first year of life.
Deficit is believed to be core to an Autism
diagnosis.
Previous research
Baron-Cohen (1992) found that no participants passed the
second-order theory of mind test.
Ozonoff et al. (1991) found that adults with ‘high
functioning autism’ or Asperger Syndrome passed theory
of mind tests.
Happé (1994) used an advanced theory of mind test and
found that adults with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome did
less well than the matched control group.
Aim
To use an adult test of theory of mind competence
The ‘Eyes task’
Participants look at photographs of the eye region of face.
They have a forced choice of two words to describe what
the person in the photograph might be feeling or thinking.
Emotions are ‘basic’, e.g. happy, sad, angry; or ‘complex’,
e.g. arrogant, scheming.
Procedure
Photographs of the eye region of 25 different faces (male
and female) were used.
same size 15 × 10 cm
black and white
same regions midway along nose to just above eyebrow
Participants
There were three groups of participants.
All had normal (>85) intelligence on Wechsler Adult Intelligence
Test.
16 Adults with High functioning autism/Asperger’s Syndrome
13 males: 3 females
recruited by advert and clinics
10 adults with Tourette’s Syndrome
age matched
8 males: 2 females
50 normal adults (from Cambridge)
25 males: 25 females
assumed normal intelligence
Why did Baron-Cohen use participants with Tourette’s Syndrome?
Tourettes participants were used as Tourette’s Syndrome
and autism are similar and using both would control some
of the extraneous variables.
Both Tourette’s Syndrome and autism participants:
had normal intelligence
suffered with disorder from childhood
had disorders that disrupted schooling and peer
relations
had disorders supposed to originate in frontal lobe
abnormalities.
Participants in both clinical groups had passed Theory of
Mind tests based on 6-year-old Theory of mind skills.
Method and design
The Eyes task, Strange Stories task and two control tasks
were presented in random order to all subjects.
Subjects were tested in a quiet room either at home, in
clinic or in a laboratory.
Independent design.
Independent and dependent
variables
Independent variables:
autism
Tourette’s Syndrome
normal
gender in normal group
Dependent variables:
correct identification of emotion
correct identification of gender
Hypotheses
1. Patients with Tourette’s Syndrome would be unimpaired
on this advanced theory of mind test, but the subjects
with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome would show a
significant impairment on this test.
2. Subjects who had difficulties when completing the Eyes
task or Strange Stories task should also have difficulties
when completing the other task.
3. Normal females may be superior to normal males in
emotion perception.
Eyes task
Words were generated by the panel and tested.
Each word was presented with a ‘foil’ or opposite.
e.g. serious vs playful
The method of using the eyes only was chosen as no
context/planning skills are required.
Strange Stories task
This had already been linked to theory of mind (Joliffe
1997).
It was carried out to validate Eyes task.
It found that Tourette’s Syndrome group made no errors,
autism/Asperger’s Syndrome group made a significant
number of errors.
This gives the Eyes task concurrent validity.
Control tasks
Basic emotion recognition task
looking at whole faces and judging emotions
Gender recognition task
looking at two sets of eyes and identifying gender
On the two control tasks, there were no differences
between the groups.
Results for Eyes task
Mean correct answers
Group
(Max 25)
Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome 16.3
Normal 20.3
Tourette’s Syndrome 20.4
Using Independent t test:-
Difference between autism/Asperger’s Syndrome and normal is
p = .0001
Difference between autism/Asperger’s Syndrome and Tourette’s
Syndrome is p = .001
No significant difference between Tourette’s Syndrome and normal
Other results
In normal groups, females performed significantly better than
males.
Comparing normal males with autism/Asperger’s Syndrome
group, normal males performed significantly better.
If 15/25 = chance results
8/16 Asperger’s Syndrome above chance
10/10 Tourette’s Syndrome above chance
50/50 Normal above chance
Conclusions
Adults with autism/Asperger’s Syndrome were impaired
on the Theory of Mind test.
As only autism/Asperger’s Syndrome made errors on both
the Eyes task and the Strange Stories task, this validates
the Eyes task.
Normal females better than normal males on Theory of
Mind test.
Intelligence is not linked with performance (some of the
autism group had university degrees).