Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Do You Have Asperger's?)
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I hypothesise that the social issues geeks experience are predominantly caused by hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, rather than insensitivity; In keeping with the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis we tend to underestimate our ability to empathise, thereby causing us to overanalyse social situations, leading to anxiety and paralysis.
Didn't find it stressful. It was interesting though when I would get one wrong and absolutely could NOT see why it would be the emotion described...
EDIT: Reading further in the comments quite a few folks revealed a lower score. Actually that should not be too surprising, since some number of high-achieving, socially awkward types find fulfillment in hacking (Bill Gates).
For some of them I felt like I was doing it "in software", using rules that I know consciously instead of intuitively recognising the emotion. But I don't know to what extent that's actually true (or if it's even a particularly meaningful distinction).
I definitely felt like I had an easier time with some emotions than others. That's not surprising, but it would be interesting to see statistics for each individual face.
(Me, I got 26. They don't call me Mr. Average for nothin'.)
EDIT: If I'd gotten 25, do you think I'd have included that last line?
Edit: It'd also be cool if they gave us more data than just the total number correct. Like, which emotions was I the best at recognizing? How well did I do with male faces as compared with female faces? Etc.
Other than that, I enjoyed the test. Simple, quick, painless and intriguing. I'm intrigued, can you see?
29 point something. I was expecting a lot less.
The first Turing test I've gotten nervous doing.
A lot of people get Asperger's, introversion and shyness mixed, but they are three completely different things.
Shyness is all about anxiety about social interaction. Oversensitivity to social norms can cause it, yes, but also bad experiences or low self-esteem.
Introversion/Extroversion is about where you focus your mind. Introverted people are more focused on their own thoughts and mental processes, and extroverted people are more focused on interacting with the mental processes of other people. If something, introversion would imply caring less about social interaction and social norms, not oversensitivity. That doesn't mean introverted people don't care or follow social norms, or that they're not sociable. They just need more time with their own thoughts and feel less stimulated by petty social interaction like small talk. That doesn't mean introverted people are not sociable. Some introverts are very sociable and good at conversations, because they try to make their conversations interesting and stimulating. Some other are not interested in being sociable at all.
(scored a 32, for the record)
This seems very poor for a site that appears to sell software with which to make quizzes.
When I didn't think about it, And trusted my instincts and feelings instead. I always got it right. And figured it out almost instantly. But logically I can't explain that. It was like magic.
Not often, but supplying only the eyes is a good way to bring the scores down into a more useful range for the test. Assuming that eye-specific recognition ability is a close enough proxy for overall ability, of course.
Personally I don't think this test has anything to do with Asperger's. My feeling is that facial recognition is to some extent an acquired skill like anything else, and that the lowest scores are largely going to go to the people with the least experience in attending to the emotions of others.
When they are being lied to. That is, every day.
I think it's harder to control both, a disparity between the two suggests something is amiss. Also, "the eyes are the windows of the soul" has some basis in human behaviour IMO.
Japanese-style emoticon, happy eyes ^_^
I felt like I was picking the desired answer, not reading an actual emotion. An artifact of the test maybe. The expressions read artificial to me--like pictures of actors or models. Not sure what that says.
This also explains why humans so easily find faces in inanimate objects, or in three-character sequences like :-) and ^_^. We're just highly tuned to recognize and parse very particular physical features.
Or is this perhaps a part of the test, in which is is intentionally testing a subset of possible emotions rather than a wide gamut?
Of the ones I did get the majority were calculated guesses. I would have scored a lot lower if it wasn't multiple choice... or as my roommate pointed out if there was a fifth option: None of the above.
@makmanalp asked a very good question about why they tested only looking at the eyes and not the res of the face, or the rest of the body. While looking at the rest of the face would have been helpful, much of the way we express ourselves is done just in our eyes.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman in his book "Social Intelligence" says that the eyes are, "...something akin to the poetic idea that the eyes are windows on the soul: the eyes offer glimpses into a person’s most private feelings. More specifically the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly… neuron to neuron, [to] three major regions of the brain: the cortex (or “thinking brain”), the amygdala (the trigger point for many emotional reactions), and the brain stem (the “reptilian” zones for automatic response) (63-64)."
I highly recommend Paul Ekman's "Emotions Revealed" if you're interested in this sort of thing. It's about reading facial micro-expressions - not about Asperger's. I recomend Goleman's books as well, but you'll probably find Ekman's more interesting.
I've done quite a bit of personal research on this stuff, and while I'm no expert I'd be happy to try and answer any questions that people have.
I think that training boosted my score a lot. You might say I've studied for this test...
Even so I was actually a bit amazed by my own ability to read the different emotions quite quickly since I'm worthless at reading people in real life.
Actually, after I started mousing over the images to see full-size, and spending several seconds studying each face, I was almost always correct.
Yay for me.
One, I think "ashamed", looked just like the expression on a character in a TV show, SGU colonel young, and I realized he nails the mood perfectly.
But then again, I've been working on "hacking" by aspergers for past few years, working from the ground up to figure out wtf facial expressions mean among other things.