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This conclusion was reached by scientists from the University of Cambridge, who conducted the largest study using the Reading Eyes test.
The results of testing healthy people are well known: women usually show higher results. As for people with autism, they do not see such differences: both men and women show results in the “absolutely male type”. Findings like these lend support to the theory that people with autism develop brains that are “extremely masculine.”
Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Center for Autism Research at the University of Cambridge, led the study. Nearly 400 people with autism or Asperger’s took the test online. They were required to look at a series of photographs in which only the eyes were visible and choose one of the four words that best represented how the person was thinking and feeling.
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- How do autists see us?
The Eye Reading Test tests a person’s ability to imagine another’s thoughts/feelings and show empathy, and is also designed to detect small individual differences in social sensitivity. First of all, the test measures the “cognitive” component of empathy – the ability to recognize or suggest what is going on in a person’s soul. The test has been used in hundreds of studies around the world, and it is well known that, on average, women perform better than men, and people with autism perform worse. It is noteworthy that women with autism in this case differ significantly more from healthy women than men with autism from healthy men.
“We see these patterns not only in the Eye Reading test. Last year, we found similar results in tests for empathy quotient and systematization quotient (the so-called questionnaires that allow you to determine, respectively, a person’s social sensitivity, his interest and ability to understand complex systems),” says Simon Baron-Cohen.
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- “Am I autistic? Don’t confuse me with my diagnosis.”
“Imagine that you look a person in the eye and are not able to easily and intuitively “read” his thoughts and feelings. Research like this could help explain why children with autism avoid eye contact from early childhood and get lost in dynamic social situations where people exchange glances without words all the time. It is important for researchers and therapists to find a way to teach people with autism to “read” the emotional state of another person without words,” adds Carrie Allison, co-author of the study, from the Center for Autism Research Carrie Allison.
Подробнее см. S. Baron-Cohen et al. «The «Reading the mind in the eyes» test: Complete absence of typical sex difference in ~400 men and women with autism», PLoS One, August 2015.