
Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Do You Have Asperger's?) - georgecmu
http://www.questionwritertracker.com/index.php/quiz/display?id=61&token=Z4MK3TKB
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jdietrich
Prediction: The average HNer will score significantly higher than the general
average.

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.

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dageshi
Spot on. 30 out of 36.

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david55475
35 out of 36. I've often thought I was hypersensitive about things/people, and
I'm always concerned with what other people are feeling, even more than my
(female) partner :)

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philh
As someone else points out, without standard deviations it's hard to know how
indicative this score is. I got 23, which is consistent with previous tests
I've taken (on which I score somewhere between "autistic" and "not autistic").

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.

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glhaynes
As always, it should be noted that it seems likely that people who got high
scores would be more likely to post theirs (few people like to show off as
below-average!), which is one reason taking an average of the scores posted on
this page isn't indicative of an HN average score.

(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?

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Nogwater
26 here too. I felt like on some of them I would project a choice onto the
eyes. Some where easy (only one choice made sense), and some seemed completely
arbitrary.

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KoZeN
27 here. I thought I would do better to be honest. I make a pretty decent
amount of pocket money playing poker and I consider my biggest strength to be
my ability to read people in an incredibly short period of time. Then again, I
am a bit of an arrogant git.

~~~
snes
26 for me

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m-photonic
It would be nice if they'd tell us the standard deviation in addition to the
averages. I got 19, which puts me below the mean for the Asperger/HFA
population, but I'm fairly sure I'm not in that category. Really, the two
averages are barely more than four points apart, which is a rather modest
interval compared to the range of scores that's been reported in this thread
so far.

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.

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rprospero
I'm also a little curious about the gender data from a different perspective.
I don't know whether the eyes were randomized, but, when I took the test, all
of the "romantic" emotions (e.g. flirtatious) in the test were displayed with
female eyes. If that's the same way for everyone, I can't help but think that
that would skew the results.

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BoppreH
People who made the test software, please, _please_ , don't resize my browser,
send my info without telling me or redirecting to the site that built the
test.

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.

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aruvam
My feelings exactly. Got 29 points - in the ones that I got incorrect, it was
usually the alternate that I had narrowed it down to that was the right one.

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vessenes
I found that test extremely stressful, although I was on track for 33 / 36
when I stopped. Intriguing! Other HN'ers -- did you find it stress-inducing?

The first Turing test I've gotten nervous doing.

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shib71
33, which surprised me as I'm extremely introverted. I got the sense that the
expressions fell into different categories based on where the tension around
the eyes was, and the matching word had been randomly chosen from the
category. The "1000 yard stare" category, the "happy" category, and so on. By
the end I was enjoying this new match-the-category puzzle.

~~~
PixelRobot
I'm also extremely introverted, and I got a 34. Asperger's and introversion
are very different.

A lot of people get Asperger's, introversion and shyness mixed, but they are
three completely different things.

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newobj
The people I know with Asperger's are anything BUT introverted or shy. They
overshare. They overtalk. They're oblivious to social norms. Shyness and
introversion, if anything, to me, seem like an oversensitivity to social
norms.

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PixelRobot
Well, you're more likely to know the sociable people with Asperger's than the
antisocial ones, right? What you describe is not the case with all the people
who have Asperger's. Some avoid social interaction because they know they
don't understand the norms and prefer to avoid potential conflicts. You can't
make a generalization there.

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.

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makmanalp
Is it only me who finds it difficult to label expressions _just_ in eyes, when
it feels like an image of the overall face would be much clearer?

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techiferous
Weird bit of trivia: in photos of faces, the eyes carry most of the emotion,
but in cartoon faces, the mouth does.

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lwhi
In cartoons - eyebrows are used to express a great deal of emotion.

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jessewmc
33/36. Found it stressful.

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.

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amadiver
I'm amazed the message their eyes sent was so clear and nuanced.

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lmkg
When humans see a face, we apparently focus on the eyes and the lips. Once,
for a summer job, I worked with our school photographer retouching the scanned
images of the incoming freshman class. For efficiency, we just blurred the
images to obliterate any scanning errors, and then restored and hand-retouched
only the eyes and lips. Subjectively, the difference between blurred and
blurred-with-original-eyes-and-lips was astonishing, while the difference
between original and BWOEAL was comparatively rather small. I would assume
that human expression and human vision evolved in parallel, in a complimentary
fashion.

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.

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jey
Yup, and this "built-in" face-reading circuitry can go wrong in interesting
ways:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcher_effect>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia>

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cb33
I got just about average (26) but I would be interested to see if HN has an
inordinate amount of people coming in around the low 20's.

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endlessvoid94
I also got a 26. Apparently I'm not as good at reading people as I thought...

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ratsbane
Also 26. The average on HN seems a bit higher. I wonder if there's some
selection bias towards reporting higher answers.

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msbarnett
Quite possibly. The test is also long enough that I probably would have bailed
out long before finishing if I had felt I wasn't doing well enough to be
curious about the end result.

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tcskeptic
34/36 I did not find it stressful. I think that was because of the instant
feedback, though if I had been getting questions wrong, that would have made
things much worse than just finding out at the end.

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silvertab
Same here (34/36)... I was kinda surprised because I felt some of them were
really wild guesses and it usually turned out I guessed correctly...

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dahjelle
Does anyone else feel like the questions were strangely distributed? I'm not
exactly sure why. I guess I would have expected many more suspicious or
confused faces, and I don't think I found very many. (Ended up with a 27.) I
also saw the word "puzzled" as a potential answer, but I don't remember
choosing it as an option. For that matter, puzzled seems like an emotion in
which one would rarely see the subject's eyes.

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?

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muloka
23 over here.

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.

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duckrank
I got a 24. As someone diagnosed with Asperger's Spectrum Disorder (Nonverbal
Learning Disorder to be exact), this surprised me. I expected it to be lower.
Granted, I've done some reading up on facial expressions so that might have
helped.

@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.

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dp7531
19\. I thought the test was a joke until my wife took it and got 31.

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JoshCole
I've been diagnosed with apsergers and got a 32, nice!

~~~
lotharbot
Also a 32 here, and (at least when it comes to reading social cues) I've got
all of the classic Aspergers symptoms. For example, my wife had to train me to
make eye contact during conversation.

I think that training boosted my score a lot. You might say I've studied for
this test...

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spazz
Ah 26, always a bit disappointing when you get the average score. One issue
for me was that since english is not my native language I had to look up quite
a few of the words describing different emotions.

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.

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wtracy
For the first half of the test, I was kicking myself over the number I got
wrong, but my final score placed me as above average.

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.

~~~
rue
I think I did "better" with the small images, the large ones leading to
overanalysis perhaps?

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rleisti
I got 21. I have a feeling that if I took this test a bunch of times (with
different faces) that I'd probably get better at it.

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mickdarling
30 with several of the wrong answers being my 50/50 choices with the actual
correct answer. Nearly all of the ones I got correct, I was instantly certain.

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.

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rograndom
I have aspergers, but I got 30. Strange. The ones I had difficultly with were
the "flirty" female ones.

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.

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bradfordw
21/36 - high functioning autism. Should I go see someone about this perhaps?
Weird.

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dgordon
22...I think I got five or six wrong by second-guessing my first instinct.

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tremendo
31\. The only stress was that at a point I was alarmed because I felt I was
misreading too many.

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sliceof314
23 here, i'm off to watch jeopardy at 5 o'clock! and then it's judge Wapner...

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SageRaven
I scored 29. Not stressful, but kinda odd all the same.

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Eddk
31

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jhrobert
26

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klinquist
31 here.

