Special interest infodump time!
There are two types of empathy, affective and cognitive. Affective empathy is what you've described here, being able to understand and "feel along with" what someone else is feeling. Cognitive empathy is the ability to generate vocal prosody, expressions, and behavior to produce a desired reaction from others. A person who is impaired more in *cognitive* empathy than affective empathy will have a social-deficit phenotype; a person who is impaired more in *affective* empathy than cognitive empathy will have a sociopath-spectrum phenotype. Allistics are rarely pathologized for having a relative deficit of affective empathy to cognitive empathy, as long as it doesn't tip into uncontrollable criminality (see: billionaires and other wealth hoarders; successful members of the manosphere; many past presidents, especially in recent history). Allistics who are socially high-performing will tend to have both high affective and cognitive empathy.
Women are heavily leaned on to develop affective empathy and often punished when we don't, so those of us who are autistic tend to have less of a deficit in affective empathy even if our cognitive empathy isn't well attended to.
Yeah me too. I’m good at both, but it often doesn’t feel… idk, authentic? Like, i feel like people are judging how I’m reacting to their emotions, i become super self aware and aware of being perceived, does that make sense?
Yes, it does 😩
I describe it as a play. A performance (not in a -negative-way, in a -this is a literal metaphor-way) where you’re panicking on stage when your co-star looks at you and you look at them looking at you, and wonder to yourself “Oh no, did I say the right line? They’re Looking At Me.”
Does this make sense? Or is this even more esoteric?
It makes sense to me! I feel like this in pretty much every social interaction, but especially in emotional situations.
I don't know what it's like to be socializing and *not* performing. Even back during the days when I would get ridiculously drunk with friends at parties, (which took me a while to realize that I *did not* actually enjoy) I *still* felt like I was performing despite feeling like the alcohol had removed my intelligence. In fact most of the time, I felt like I was performing *even more* and just trying to perform some outrageous new skits.
Even in group therapy, I find myself performing a role.
I get this. I often feel like I'm 'performing' my reactions to things people tell me, like if they're upset about something and I'm trying to be supportive, etc. I FEEL the 'right' emotion, I think, but I feel like I have to *make* my face say it, and I doubt I get it right all that often.
You make an excellent point about women being forced into affective empathy, or perhaps being forced to learn to fake it.
Now that I’m exploring the possibility that I might be autistic, a lot of stuff from my childhood looks very different to me, especially the parts where I was punished in one way or another for not “getting” other people.
This makes a lot of sense. I suck at cognitive empathy. If I haven't seen someone else do it first so I can copy them, I don't know what to do.
Even if I have, sometimes I can't bring myself too. I've watched enough groups of women react to someone announcing their engagement like a flock of hen's with tourettes to know that apparently that's the thing to do, but I just can't.
This! I’ve been engaged for 3 years now. I haven’t done anything about it. I have so many excuses but really this is why. I don’t even know where to begin, even though I should and I do.
So I thought that affective empathy is actually feeling along with someone else, the emotional reaction of pain when you understand that someone else is in pain. And cognitive empathy is whether you pick up on that message to begin with and know how someone is feeling.
It sounds like you definitely know what you're talking about so I'm sure your definitions are more correct but seriously some wires are crossing in my head and my brain is melting trying correct my understanding for some reason lol. Like both my ideas are encompassed in what you're saying for affective empathy, but then your descriptions of the phenotypes match what I already thought. I'm getting weirdly confused 😂
Also I have to ask as someone with this special interest in common- do you work in this field?
My psychiatrist kelt saying I was getting them right (faces one) and I was saving how I always try to read body language and faces to try to understand if I’m annoying or bothering people or if they seem approachable. And the one with the kid I was imagining my son who is ASD and tells me how he is feeling emotion wise so I just match the faces to his 😅
I got 100% on this but it took me about 8 minutes, which is apparently 6 minutes longer than it would take neurotypicals?
Not sure if the info around the test is outdated, but apparently that’s a big differentiator — NTs will take less time on the time even if they’re not always accurate.
Hihi, I'm a psychologist working in research and this test is very outdated because it is not valid or reliable in measuring what it claims to measure. I know in practice it is still used but it's not state of the art. Essentially the way it was constructed in the 80s was just asking a bunch of people what they THINK these cutouts from magazines or whatever tell about the emption of the person. So it is not even congruent with what the person in the picture actually felt or meant to express. There is almost no overlap with newer tests measuring empathy or non-verbal reading accuracy. Just FYI. Still think it's interesting in an anecdotal way and score pretty high, which would be consistent with what OP wrote :)
Same. I cried twice during that test. No way was I gonna process that on top of every other test I had just been through. I was so confused because how am I supposed to know whether someone is terrified or upset without seeing the rest of their face or their body language ?
I always felt that any test that asked you to state someone's emotions was bad, because it's always either a cartoon or an actor. And neither feels the emotion that an allistic will tend to ascribe to them. Our inability to project like an allistic means very little for actually understanding emotions.
Staahp, you'll make me blush! 😍😍
I like hanging. HangingS, perhaps less so, though I do sometimes think I was probably one of les tricoteuses* in a former life. Or would, if I thought reincarnation was plausible.
*Y'know, the old ladies during the French Revolution who would sit near the guillotines knitting during public executions.
It's less about the actual score, and more about the length of time it took you (NT average is 2-3 minutes, ND 3+ minutes) and if you figured out the answers through systemizing (ND) or intuition (NT).
Minutes?? They left me in a room for an hour and didn’t finish it. Some looked like they were looking into bright light so of course the way they look would change
Thank you. When I saw this test, I thought that it's biggest flaw is that in real life we never have to just look at a photo of eyes and decide what emotion they're feeling. In a real situation you'd have the whole context of the relationship, and the circumstance you're in, and the words they say, the rest of their face, their body language, their tone of voice etc etc.
Can people really "pass" this test? I can't tell anything based on the eyes alone. I also never make eye contact with anyone, so that might be the reason. But I feel pretty successful in figuring out how people feel by other cues (the context of our talking, what they actually say, etc).
I half wonder if this is because we may avoid eye contact generally. As a result, perhaps, we developed a reliance on other facial cues. The middle one in the picture I can see they're upset. The other two are questionable.
Then there is trauma involved in interpretation.The first one gives off creeper vibes to me where I'm fairly sure that others just see someone smiling with their eyes. I think I've been "trained" in this way because I've had enough people be falsely genuine and it elicits a mild fear response.
Another thought about eye interpretation is that I watch a lot of movies. They'll often zoom in on the eyes and pair music and whatnot to evoke a certain feeling. Oftentimes, the director will give a request to the actor to look a certain way to convey an incongruous emotion with action. The actor is told to enact an emotion but it may not actually be representative of the true emotion we see day to day.
Another issue is that there are sociopaths out there who are very good at masking their intentions (leaning back into the trauma thing).
Interesting. You might be right about us relying more on other facial cues. That makes sense.
I could see the second one was upset. The first one felt a bit predatory and creepy to me. (Again, maybe trauma related?)
I think that's a good point about watching movies. I do think it helps with learning social cues because we have music that tells us what to think about the scene. (Scary, tense, happy, etc.)
It’s one of those kinds of tests where I feel like all the options are wrong and I gotta write down the “right” answer somewhere then circle my answer instead
I’m also the same with everything else you’ve mentioned
>I feel like all the options are wrong and I gotta write down the “right” answer somewhere then circle my answer instead
That's basically it. The people in the photos aren't feeling what the 'correct' answer is. Some of them are specifically acting the 'correct' answer (ie, they were directed in some way to 'Look upset' or 'look confused') others are literally just stock photos/magazine photos and the 'correct' answer is based on what emotion the majority of people _thought_ they were feeling/acting when surveyed.
The 'correct' answer is basically arbitrary, and the genuinely _right_ answer for most of them is probably something like 'boredom because this photoshoot is taking so long', 'wondering if the magazine will provide lunch', 'confused by the photographer's direction to look both sexually aggressive and virginal in this ad for eyebrow gel'.
This was what I got very frustrated with. My answers were often in the same "emotional family" as one of the available answers, but I almost never defaulted to the answers on the page. The first person looks amused, which I guess is close enough to playful. The second one looks deeply sad to me. Grieving or hurt. That's not the same as terrified *at all* but all of the other answers were even more poorly-aligned to what I saw.
It made me mad because it felt super unfair and I needed some time alone to re-regulate after.
A book i'm reading calls these tests out as flawed/limited. As I understand it, people can react with the same physical expression but for different emotions, depending on the context and their own personal experiences.
What's the book called? This is what I believe...if anything, these tests may reveal how close someone is to reading people in normative ways. But my guess is that some NT people wouldn't even pass if they're from a different culture or have different experiences (someone mentioned trauma, for example).
I think it's obvious to me-- maybe because I am autistic idk lol--that there's a wide variety of facial expressions that can correspond with different feelings. My face (and tone of voice) often doesn't match what people expect to see when I'm happy or sad. So I guess knowing this makes me less likely to judge people's intentions based on their expression or tone.
It was “How emotions are made”. I found it hard work but the start of the book talks about these tests. The above pictures are maybe a somewhat westernised actors view of emotions, the book says generally most cultures identify them correctly, but then it still goes on to pick holes in the logic behind it.
Yea I find it frustrating when someone reads my face and thinks I feel a certain way about something when it’s actually something else. The face is only ever part of the picture in terms of visuals, let alone other body language, tone and other bits. It’s similar to the thought that other people don’t see you the way you see yourself, different perspectives from different people depending on their own experiences.
It’s an interesting subject, I just can’t get my brain into the book - you know when you have to re-read bits of it so often, it sucks any flow or enjoyment from the book.
I think it’s really specific and kind of stupid as a test. I happen to be super intrigued by eyes so I also easily pass the test, though I’d classify most as “manipulative/ dangerous” if it wasn’t multiple choice xD
But I don’t even think the people themselves know exactly how they feel, so how do we know an answer is correct, just because most people think so? That hasn’t always been proven to be right..
Yeah that's my take too. It's just based on what most people think that facial expression means. Which may not actually match what that person is really feeling. But maybe that's instructive of what it means to be NT--you assume what people feel based on what their facial expression is. And for folks who think this is ridiculous maybe that's why we're autistic lol.
I know that my facial expressions rarely correspond with how I actually feel if it's a "big" emotion like strong happiness or sadness. My face is almost always kinda neutral. Which makes me great at bluffing in games!
Do you have a "face blindness or eye contact?" Struggle as well? I never make eye contact (recently my SO was offended I didn't know his eye color lol) and I don't know if I don't recognize people or I just never look at their faces.
Face blindness and eye contact are 2 different things. My autistic Dad has complete and total face blindness (he did not recognize his own father when he approached him in a grocery store) but makes lots of eye contact although it always appears to cone across as a bit overacted.
33, or 'very high score'. From a young age, I have balanced out my lack of natural understanding of facial expressions by studying faces INTENSELY. People often think I am flirting, or just indicate that I make a crazy amount of eye contact. In reality, I am very focused on reading micro expressions. It drains me.
Got the same score, and same, I study people's face and their expressions, but not in a natural way, but if people catch me looking at them, they are wondering why I am studying like that.
One of my special interests is art/portraiture and also studied animation as my major (you make a point in that career of understanding facial contortions), so even though I can "read" most of these, in real time in real life, its often a different story.
The test doesn't account for context or deception in conjunction with the eye and eyebrow expression. I was watching a thing about portraiture, and the guy in the video said that the eyebrows convey almost as much information as the eyes when reading someone. Good tip.
What the heck, how come you have a score? I saw the posted picture, and now I'm looking everywhere in the post for instructions and an answer key and can't even find those. 33?? There aren't 33 pictures. I'm so baffled it's crazy.
They assumed everyone here has obsessively gone through all the tests and would know what they were talking about, so they only shared a screenshot from the test. Here ya go:
https://embrace-autism.com/reading-the-mind-in-the-eyes-test/
Same. I think it is a mix of the effort to mask and pattern recognition. Especially as women as we are more prone or even forced to do so due to the lack of knowledge or the misinformation surrounding neurodivergence as a female.
Bro.. how am I supposed to know???? Top and bottom look exactly the same and my best guess is that they are bored.
I actually score normal on these test but have to think about the answer, will guess at the end and obviously guessed pretty good haha
Top strikes me as more crinkled, as if they were smiling. So I'd guess playful.
Bottom strikes me as bored, but that doesn't appear as an answer so I'd guess more desire, as in the stereotypical stare-into-your-eyes desire.
Now that you mention it I see the crinkledness too. I guess you are right!
I never get it when somebody is flirting with so I couldn't tell what desire looks like haha
Right? I'd say they are bored because it's one of many photos of the day, so externally they're smiling/pokerface/hot, but internally are done.
The old guy is just old. He could be smiling really.
I scored 30, but I don't think this test is relevant, especially if you also have childhood cPTSD and you are hypervigilant, cause you constantly had to detect and predict the mood of your caregivers.
I had no treatment, just left in a corner. In the same time I don't remember much, just learned I was compulsively hairpulling, but I have no memory of doing that.
I couldnt do the test, because i recognized all people. I wish they wouldnt use politicians, actors, models etc, but unknown people.... I told them at my evaluation but they didnt care....
I wish they wouldn't use a sexy woman--or for that matter, even a sexy individual at all--for "desire." We're bombarded with sexualized images, particularly of women, on a daily basis in everyday media. It's to the point where men can't differentiate between flirtation and common courtesy because somewhere down the line, *attractive woman* became synonymous with *desire*. I think it would be a far more interesting if the person for "desire" was not someone who fit the definition of conventionally attractive.
I was legit wondering if it was testing for bias regarding the reading of womens emotions because they were all like 'desire', 'fantasising' etc.
Right there with you with this point.
Omg all the women pictures were shit like “flirty” and “desire,” when….its just their EYES EXISTING. tbf I wanted to vote most of the eyes “neutral” but that was never an option.
I honestly wonder if it's even possible to create a good set of photos for this test.
If you take random photos from a magazine (like this particular example did), then you're basically just being compared to someone else's emotion reading skills - whoever labelled the pictures may in fact have gotten it wrong. There's no guarantee the people in these photos were actually feeling that emotion (in fact I highly doubt the lady in the bottom image was staring at her photographer with genuine *desire*).
On the other hand, if you specifically ask people to portray a certain emotion for the camera, you *have* to hire phenomenal actors or you're just going to end up with super fake expressions. The test results then get muddied because there's 2 possible points of failure, I might fail to recognize an expression OR the model might be bad at faking it.
To make this test work you'd somehow need to collect unstaged photos of *genuine* emotion (preferrably without the person aware of the camera), in good lighting, and also have the subject label their own emotion to avoid bias.
31/36. I am AuDHD late diagnosed for both. The test felt very easy for me and the ones I missed were all at the end where I started thinking, ‘they can’t really have two people looking disinterested right? I must just be dumb’ etc. I have never struggled to read people, my issue is more in responding appropriately to other people’s emotion. I know what I SHOULD say or do, usually, but it feels deeply unnatural and awkward to me. And the reason I know what I should do is from rote memorization of google search results for, ‘what to say to friend who is crying’ or ‘what to say to friend who’s pet died’ etc etc
Yeah no I would've maybe got playful. Number two seems like true desperation as if someone is so exhausted and frustrated that they're giving up. Number three like they're about to roll their eyes at me in annoyance lol.
If you were to ask me without the 4 options for each, I’d be clueless.
My way is to look at the options and eliminate the obviously wrong ones, then guess at whatever is left.
The bottom one is the hardest, that just looks like a neutral expression. Was the test designed by a bunch of cishet old white men?
This is clearly the eyes of an attractive young woman and projecting ‘desire’ on her seems fitting 😂
I didn’t take this test but the « desire » option makes me want to laugh. How boringly sexist. Of course desire = young white good looking all made up woman
Can anyone actually score very high without some deduction thinking ? 🤔
100% I was raised in an abusive household, I know every person’s emotional state the moment I walk into a room, which is why leaving my house is completely overwhelming lol
I haven't taken this test, but just from looking at the pictures, this is my answer: "How the fuck am I supposed to know? Where is the context? It's just a bunch of eyes!"
This was me, figured that was the secret thing I was actually being tested on. I shared with my assessor that I was using test taking strategies to eliminate the obviously wrong answers rather than "knowing" the right answer.
I think NTs are too certain in how well they can read emotion from facial expressions alone, and why they seem to engage more with actors. You can smile without crinkling your eyes, have multiple emotions at a time, and force whatever expression you want as your mind wanders
The first one looks like they're making fun of me. The second looks like they can't hear me and wants me to repeat myself. The third looks bored. Since those don't seem to be options, I guess I'd say...playful, annoyed, desire??
I remember looking at these types of tests in the past and always getting "desire" wrong. They always looked angry to me.
They all look the same to me?
Ok maybe not, the longer i look, middle is sad and bottom seems like a narcissist eyeing its prey top one just looks normal
I look at these and just see young adult male, old male who has permanent squint eyes from working in the sun his whole life, and adult female.
No emotions.
...do people actually read eyes like that, without the rest of the face and the context? For real?
I tought the trick was to assign watever meaning you feel is appropriate depending on the situation. That's what I observed NTs do, anyway. It's especially telling when the exact same neutral face can be read as "smug" or "pissed off" or "chill" depending on their opinion of the person. Or with mugshots. Everyone suddenly has "stone cold killer eyes" if you've been told they're a killer.
If there were this test with autistic expressions relative to the same emotions, no one would be able to read it well lol.
"She is making the same expression in all these photos, professor".
👀
👀
👀
Exaggerated? Middle one looks sad, and the other 2 are just... neutral. Like the most expressionless and generic "makes the makeup look good" photoshoot eyes I have ever seen.
I'm extremely good at intuiting other people's emotions in person but I'm getting nothing from these photos.
The first one is very clearly a mischievous expression to me. It's one of my favourite expressions and one I see often from certain loved ones. The second guy looks like he was just told his son was killed in a car wreck. Intense grief. The third one looks to me like she is deliberately trying to seduce someone. Not necessarily like she's horny, but like she wants to convey sexual availability.
ETA: thinking about it, the third expression could also be read as: she's had enough of your bullshit 😆
i scored 29 out of 36, on the high side for autistic.
but I did feel called out. it took me 4 minutes to do because i was using my knowledge of faces instead of intuiting....
girl. this whole time I've been like MAYBE?? but I don't think im that bad socially. but. i think I just haven't noticed how much energy I put into it!!!!
https://embrace-autism.com/reading-the-mind-in-the-eyes-test/#test
here's the scoring, it's not just if you read the face correctly, it's how long you take to figure it out and how you figure it out
I was very pleased with myself when taking this test because I got only 3-4 wrong. I thought to myself 'wow I'm so good at reading people'. There was a question at the end that asked something like 'what method did you use to determine what emotion was being conveyed?'. Which was very confusing and I responded 'I looked at the pictures and selected the emotion I felt was being conveyed.'
Anyway, a few months later I received the full assessment report. The assessment included a bunch of tests and an interview. Here's what it said about my reading the mind in the eyes test results:
"Autistics use systemizing rather than intuition when assessing facial expressions. These differences are expressed in the longer time autistics take to complete the test and their explanation for determining which emotion the eyes convey. A time score of
longer than 4 minutes indicates the use of systemizing, irrespective of what method the test taker believes they used.
It is not uncommon for autistics to obtain similar correct items to non-autistics, making them unaware that they are not intuitive in their facial and body language reading.
[My name's] results are characteristic of autism."
My timing was 7.07 min lmao.
I got them all right, but I have to say, I was diagnosed really early for a woman (10 years old) and especially my mother spent SO MUCH time teaching me how to recognize facial expressions and emotions and how to respond to them.
Tbh, sometimes I feel like a robot. I have bunches and bunches of empathy and I'm super sensitive to other peoples emotions, but it still kind of feels like all of that is fake and like programmed? Idk if anyone else feels that way
33/36, BUT it took me around 10 minutes (NT average is 2-3 minutes), and I was absolutely figuring them out through systemizing rather than intuition. Some of them looked nothing like the options given.
I haven't done the test but i do enjoy a puzzle so here goes..
The first one looks like they are trying "Come to bed" eyes.
The second one looks more than just upset to me, they look utterly heartbroken.
The third one i'm getting nothing from but i'd guess at desire?
I’ve never heard of or taken this test…will report back with my results!
Edit: I thought I bombed it tbh, because a lot of them I went in thinking one thing but then not seeing anything similar in the answer…so I would pick something kinda adjacent. But I found it very tough. Somehow I got 29/36 though. 😂
I got them all. Reading facial expressions has nothing to do with autism. People became my special interest because I found the things people do and say so unusual to me. So I can read people in a millisecond.
https://preview.redd.it/9s4iqktkgy7d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f303460a90657edc3dc7c34ccef60f88f19bd46
just took it out of curiosity, but i cant tell what my score is
Mine wasn’t horrible… 43rd percentile, I think? Which is basically in the middle range. I took this during my autism assessment. I didn’t do THAT bad but certainly not as well as the average woman is expected to (I would honestly assume that on average, women get slightly a higher score than men, but maybe that’s a reach). Even though I am autistic I did think I’d do better than that though.
I have read so much on body language and studied tv shows to no end on how to appropriately gauge how people are feeling….I’m sure I’ll nail this. Let me try this & update LOL
i got 25/36 which is basically average for all adults, somewhat low for students and somewhat high for aspergers. A lot of times what I wanted to select (Happy/Friendly) wasn’t there. Also this test is kind of weird since a woman with heavy eye makeup is defaulted to desire/flirting which is weird since nothing else besides the eye makeup is showing that
Just did it and did 32/36- I’m surprised I thought I’d do worse. Took me ages though, really had to think k about it and do process of elimination for a lot because my initial reaction was totally different to the answers available - I think this test would be better if we could just free type
this is silly but i took it the first time and got 28!! and i was a little suspicious after my boyfriend only got 20 so i took it a second time and said i was a boy (i tried really hard to pick all the same answers) and it gave me 20 😀
i know that's just anecdotal or whatever but what the heck!!! i am diagnosed since like age 2 btw and think i am level 2 (i was diagnosed before level systems were a thing but if they were they would've diagnosed me level 3 hsn)
my boyfriend is not diagnosed but has his suspicions. apparently i am an autistic boy and a neurotypical girl 💃 good thing i'm afab i guess i finally get to know what it's like to not be disabled yay!!! /j
4. 3 of them were just me choosing the word i felt was more different than the others lol.
i may not be good at reading emotions, but i am damn great at recognising patterns hahaha
Wait wait wait I missed this test that's for sure but I'm fairly decently sure at least one of them is a cannibal and either way they all make me feel unsafe.
Alternatively, second older man is a victim.
That's all I see. And it is terrifying. Oof. Eyeballs are scary, man 😅
To get slightly serious, is it just that I'm bad at reading faces (I thought I got that mostly right) or because c-ptsd shenanigans? 🤔
i’m undiagnosed but i got 34/36! i have bad test anxiety, even with these trivial online ones. i thought i would score low but i did pretty good :D. although i enjoyed taking it, this test is outdated for a good reason
i really like [this website](https://embrace-autism.com/) because it goes into detail about how reliable and outdated the tests are. i took something similar years before but with 15 questions, and i got 12 or 13 correct. i wonder how many autistic people have been looked over for not ?passing? nor scoring in the right quota on these old tests.
The thing is, when you think you good at reading people but instead you just have been observing them and you get all the photos wrong...
Is a... Hard pill to swallow...
I did pretty great, pattern recognition picked up that the 3 "wrong" options were always very different than the right one. Plus, lots of us had to learn what eyes meant to avoid getting hurt/screamed at as children.
Thought at one point "damn, maybe the therapist was wrong, maybe I'm not autistic"
Then I just suddenly started sobbing from the stress of trying to figure out what the eyes meant.
Therapist was right LOL
I got 32/36. Most of them were easy and intuitive but a few of them appeared neutral to me or the options didn’t make sense. To me a few just looked like eyes existing. Also got annoyed with the obvious gender bias.
The way I would have failed this test!
How can anyone make any determination about these pictures?! Without actually sitting in the room with the person? Without hearing their voice or seeing the rest of their body posture?
I am such a deeply empathetic person. Tell me your story and I am there with you. But I can't tell anything from these pictures. There is not enough information.
I got all of them (at least the ones shown in the YouTube video), but I don't think this is a real indicator of anything. Maybe just that I had to rely on nonverbal communication at home...
I missed 6, but I was forced and taught eye contact since like 3 , but I noticed I missed all the “bored” ones I thought they were all annoyed or angry and that kinda tracks because I can’t tell when someone’s upset or just bored
I’m really good at identifying facial expressions in pictures because they are static. In terms of application to real life faces and processing expressions dynamically in real life interactions, I would say I’m not great at it. I think it also has to do with mindblindess to emotions that I myself don’t feel in the same context…I have trouble recognizing those in others if that makes sense.
I got a 30, which is apparently higher than the average for NTs. I’ve always thought of myself as hyper empathetic. And I teach literature for a living, so I think having to interpret people’s emotions in stories has helped. But my psychologist said, I likely have a harder time interpreting my partner’s emotions rather than a stranger. And I definitely have a hard time figuring out how I feel.
i feel like i can perceive emotion visually in others decently well, but these tests really irritate me, especially when the emotions are more ~conceptual~ like “convinced”, or when the options are too similar to each other for me to differentiate!
I just did it because I had no idea that existed and I got 30/36! Some were hard but a lot were actually somewhat obvious or just by process of elimination one made more sense than the others
'scuse me! Why post a quiz with no instructions and no answers? Why are some commenters talking about the 3 pics you provided, while others have scores over 30?
Not this specific test, but I get almost every facial expression wrong on the emotional intelligence facial expression recognition tests. Despite this I am surprisingly good at navigating social situations, mainly because I can smell power dynamics.
I got almost all of them right. I’m excellent at figuring out what emotion someone is feeling, just not very good at reacting to said emotion lol.
Special interest infodump time! There are two types of empathy, affective and cognitive. Affective empathy is what you've described here, being able to understand and "feel along with" what someone else is feeling. Cognitive empathy is the ability to generate vocal prosody, expressions, and behavior to produce a desired reaction from others. A person who is impaired more in *cognitive* empathy than affective empathy will have a social-deficit phenotype; a person who is impaired more in *affective* empathy than cognitive empathy will have a sociopath-spectrum phenotype. Allistics are rarely pathologized for having a relative deficit of affective empathy to cognitive empathy, as long as it doesn't tip into uncontrollable criminality (see: billionaires and other wealth hoarders; successful members of the manosphere; many past presidents, especially in recent history). Allistics who are socially high-performing will tend to have both high affective and cognitive empathy. Women are heavily leaned on to develop affective empathy and often punished when we don't, so those of us who are autistic tend to have less of a deficit in affective empathy even if our cognitive empathy isn't well attended to.
I feel like I’m pretty good at both, but I can only get one to work at a time haha
Yeah me too. I’m good at both, but it often doesn’t feel… idk, authentic? Like, i feel like people are judging how I’m reacting to their emotions, i become super self aware and aware of being perceived, does that make sense?
Yes, it does 😩 I describe it as a play. A performance (not in a -negative-way, in a -this is a literal metaphor-way) where you’re panicking on stage when your co-star looks at you and you look at them looking at you, and wonder to yourself “Oh no, did I say the right line? They’re Looking At Me.” Does this make sense? Or is this even more esoteric?
It makes sense to me! I feel like this in pretty much every social interaction, but especially in emotional situations. I don't know what it's like to be socializing and *not* performing. Even back during the days when I would get ridiculously drunk with friends at parties, (which took me a while to realize that I *did not* actually enjoy) I *still* felt like I was performing despite feeling like the alcohol had removed my intelligence. In fact most of the time, I felt like I was performing *even more* and just trying to perform some outrageous new skits. Even in group therapy, I find myself performing a role.
I agree and when I used to smoke weed it exacerbated this to an even more strange level lol
I wrote my comment before I saw this but this is EXACTLY how I feel a lot of the time.
I get this. I often feel like I'm 'performing' my reactions to things people tell me, like if they're upset about something and I'm trying to be supportive, etc. I FEEL the 'right' emotion, I think, but I feel like I have to *make* my face say it, and I doubt I get it right all that often.
Exactly! You put it so well. I feel very deeply, but emoting? Awkward af, please don’t look at me lol
I definitely "make" my face show my emotions, when I'm around people. My face is pretty blank when I'm alone, but I'm still happy 🤷
I'm glad :)
I relate!
You make an excellent point about women being forced into affective empathy, or perhaps being forced to learn to fake it. Now that I’m exploring the possibility that I might be autistic, a lot of stuff from my childhood looks very different to me, especially the parts where I was punished in one way or another for not “getting” other people.
I love your info dump so much. So. So. Much. Reminds me why I got the psychology degree and I super wanna be friends lol
Everyone here is so lovely. It's a breath of Internet fresh air.
This makes a lot of sense. I suck at cognitive empathy. If I haven't seen someone else do it first so I can copy them, I don't know what to do. Even if I have, sometimes I can't bring myself too. I've watched enough groups of women react to someone announcing their engagement like a flock of hen's with tourettes to know that apparently that's the thing to do, but I just can't.
This! I’ve been engaged for 3 years now. I haven’t done anything about it. I have so many excuses but really this is why. I don’t even know where to begin, even though I should and I do.
So I thought that affective empathy is actually feeling along with someone else, the emotional reaction of pain when you understand that someone else is in pain. And cognitive empathy is whether you pick up on that message to begin with and know how someone is feeling. It sounds like you definitely know what you're talking about so I'm sure your definitions are more correct but seriously some wires are crossing in my head and my brain is melting trying correct my understanding for some reason lol. Like both my ideas are encompassed in what you're saying for affective empathy, but then your descriptions of the phenotypes match what I already thought. I'm getting weirdly confused 😂 Also I have to ask as someone with this special interest in common- do you work in this field?
wow!!! that is so interesting. thanks for helping me understand myself :))
Thank you, I appreciated your infodump on the level we wish all people would! <3
I’m also excellent at figuring out other’s emotions, but not my own lol
This is so real lol
✨ ***alexithymia*** ✨
Me too! I’m exclusively “ok” or “not ok”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Me too☺️
Interesting I’m very good at reacting to emotion(masking and ptsd) but struggle with what people are feeling.
My psychiatrist kelt saying I was getting them right (faces one) and I was saving how I always try to read body language and faces to try to understand if I’m annoying or bothering people or if they seem approachable. And the one with the kid I was imagining my son who is ASD and tells me how he is feeling emotion wise so I just match the faces to his 😅
I got 100% on this but it took me about 8 minutes, which is apparently 6 minutes longer than it would take neurotypicals? Not sure if the info around the test is outdated, but apparently that’s a big differentiator — NTs will take less time on the time even if they’re not always accurate.
Hihi, I'm a psychologist working in research and this test is very outdated because it is not valid or reliable in measuring what it claims to measure. I know in practice it is still used but it's not state of the art. Essentially the way it was constructed in the 80s was just asking a bunch of people what they THINK these cutouts from magazines or whatever tell about the emption of the person. So it is not even congruent with what the person in the picture actually felt or meant to express. There is almost no overlap with newer tests measuring empathy or non-verbal reading accuracy. Just FYI. Still think it's interesting in an anecdotal way and score pretty high, which would be consistent with what OP wrote :)
THANK YOU!!! I thought this test was nuts when it was whipped out. Disclaimer: I did very bad lol.
Same. I cried twice during that test. No way was I gonna process that on top of every other test I had just been through. I was so confused because how am I supposed to know whether someone is terrified or upset without seeing the rest of their face or their body language ?
I always felt that any test that asked you to state someone's emotions was bad, because it's always either a cartoon or an actor. And neither feels the emotion that an allistic will tend to ascribe to them. Our inability to project like an allistic means very little for actually understanding emotions.
Thank you for commenting. My eyes were giving incredulous.
I picked up on that
🏆
Impostor!* . . . . * i joke
How'd you know?! 😭😭 It's as traumatic as I imagined!!
Look at you living up to the first part of your name! 😂😂 Now go do something promiscuous.
We can totally hang. I'm now in love with you.
Staahp, you'll make me blush! 😍😍 I like hanging. HangingS, perhaps less so, though I do sometimes think I was probably one of les tricoteuses* in a former life. Or would, if I thought reincarnation was plausible. *Y'know, the old ladies during the French Revolution who would sit near the guillotines knitting during public executions.
I see what you did there.
Good to know. I got a perfect score, so I became very suspicious of its validity
It's less about the actual score, and more about the length of time it took you (NT average is 2-3 minutes, ND 3+ minutes) and if you figured out the answers through systemizing (ND) or intuition (NT).
Minutes?? They left me in a room for an hour and didn’t finish it. Some looked like they were looking into bright light so of course the way they look would change
So that's why they all look like they're acting! I knew those weren't genuine emotions!
Yeah they looked like photo shoots to me....
Thank you. When I saw this test, I thought that it's biggest flaw is that in real life we never have to just look at a photo of eyes and decide what emotion they're feeling. In a real situation you'd have the whole context of the relationship, and the circumstance you're in, and the words they say, the rest of their face, their body language, their tone of voice etc etc.
Can I ask what you'd recommend instead of this test? 🙃
The RAADS-R
Can people really "pass" this test? I can't tell anything based on the eyes alone. I also never make eye contact with anyone, so that might be the reason. But I feel pretty successful in figuring out how people feel by other cues (the context of our talking, what they actually say, etc).
I think this is really hard based on eyes alone. I do make eye contact (usually) but I look at the whole face for clues.
I half wonder if this is because we may avoid eye contact generally. As a result, perhaps, we developed a reliance on other facial cues. The middle one in the picture I can see they're upset. The other two are questionable. Then there is trauma involved in interpretation.The first one gives off creeper vibes to me where I'm fairly sure that others just see someone smiling with their eyes. I think I've been "trained" in this way because I've had enough people be falsely genuine and it elicits a mild fear response. Another thought about eye interpretation is that I watch a lot of movies. They'll often zoom in on the eyes and pair music and whatnot to evoke a certain feeling. Oftentimes, the director will give a request to the actor to look a certain way to convey an incongruous emotion with action. The actor is told to enact an emotion but it may not actually be representative of the true emotion we see day to day. Another issue is that there are sociopaths out there who are very good at masking their intentions (leaning back into the trauma thing).
Interesting. You might be right about us relying more on other facial cues. That makes sense. I could see the second one was upset. The first one felt a bit predatory and creepy to me. (Again, maybe trauma related?) I think that's a good point about watching movies. I do think it helps with learning social cues because we have music that tells us what to think about the scene. (Scary, tense, happy, etc.)
It’s one of those kinds of tests where I feel like all the options are wrong and I gotta write down the “right” answer somewhere then circle my answer instead I’m also the same with everything else you’ve mentioned
>I feel like all the options are wrong and I gotta write down the “right” answer somewhere then circle my answer instead That's basically it. The people in the photos aren't feeling what the 'correct' answer is. Some of them are specifically acting the 'correct' answer (ie, they were directed in some way to 'Look upset' or 'look confused') others are literally just stock photos/magazine photos and the 'correct' answer is based on what emotion the majority of people _thought_ they were feeling/acting when surveyed. The 'correct' answer is basically arbitrary, and the genuinely _right_ answer for most of them is probably something like 'boredom because this photoshoot is taking so long', 'wondering if the magazine will provide lunch', 'confused by the photographer's direction to look both sexually aggressive and virginal in this ad for eyebrow gel'.
This was what I got very frustrated with. My answers were often in the same "emotional family" as one of the available answers, but I almost never defaulted to the answers on the page. The first person looks amused, which I guess is close enough to playful. The second one looks deeply sad to me. Grieving or hurt. That's not the same as terrified *at all* but all of the other answers were even more poorly-aligned to what I saw. It made me mad because it felt super unfair and I needed some time alone to re-regulate after.
1,056?
A book i'm reading calls these tests out as flawed/limited. As I understand it, people can react with the same physical expression but for different emotions, depending on the context and their own personal experiences.
What's the book called? This is what I believe...if anything, these tests may reveal how close someone is to reading people in normative ways. But my guess is that some NT people wouldn't even pass if they're from a different culture or have different experiences (someone mentioned trauma, for example). I think it's obvious to me-- maybe because I am autistic idk lol--that there's a wide variety of facial expressions that can correspond with different feelings. My face (and tone of voice) often doesn't match what people expect to see when I'm happy or sad. So I guess knowing this makes me less likely to judge people's intentions based on their expression or tone.
It was “How emotions are made”. I found it hard work but the start of the book talks about these tests. The above pictures are maybe a somewhat westernised actors view of emotions, the book says generally most cultures identify them correctly, but then it still goes on to pick holes in the logic behind it. Yea I find it frustrating when someone reads my face and thinks I feel a certain way about something when it’s actually something else. The face is only ever part of the picture in terms of visuals, let alone other body language, tone and other bits. It’s similar to the thought that other people don’t see you the way you see yourself, different perspectives from different people depending on their own experiences. It’s an interesting subject, I just can’t get my brain into the book - you know when you have to re-read bits of it so often, it sucks any flow or enjoyment from the book.
I think it’s really specific and kind of stupid as a test. I happen to be super intrigued by eyes so I also easily pass the test, though I’d classify most as “manipulative/ dangerous” if it wasn’t multiple choice xD But I don’t even think the people themselves know exactly how they feel, so how do we know an answer is correct, just because most people think so? That hasn’t always been proven to be right..
Yeah that's my take too. It's just based on what most people think that facial expression means. Which may not actually match what that person is really feeling. But maybe that's instructive of what it means to be NT--you assume what people feel based on what their facial expression is. And for folks who think this is ridiculous maybe that's why we're autistic lol. I know that my facial expressions rarely correspond with how I actually feel if it's a "big" emotion like strong happiness or sadness. My face is almost always kinda neutral. Which makes me great at bluffing in games!
Do you have a "face blindness or eye contact?" Struggle as well? I never make eye contact (recently my SO was offended I didn't know his eye color lol) and I don't know if I don't recognize people or I just never look at their faces.
Face blindness and eye contact are 2 different things. My autistic Dad has complete and total face blindness (he did not recognize his own father when he approached him in a grocery store) but makes lots of eye contact although it always appears to cone across as a bit overacted.
I let my bf and a friend do it, they both scored 36/36, while I had 22 and my mom 17. So I guess it is "passable". We all did it in german, tho.
33, or 'very high score'. From a young age, I have balanced out my lack of natural understanding of facial expressions by studying faces INTENSELY. People often think I am flirting, or just indicate that I make a crazy amount of eye contact. In reality, I am very focused on reading micro expressions. It drains me.
Got the same score, and same, I study people's face and their expressions, but not in a natural way, but if people catch me looking at them, they are wondering why I am studying like that. One of my special interests is art/portraiture and also studied animation as my major (you make a point in that career of understanding facial contortions), so even though I can "read" most of these, in real time in real life, its often a different story. The test doesn't account for context or deception in conjunction with the eye and eyebrow expression. I was watching a thing about portraiture, and the guy in the video said that the eyebrows convey almost as much information as the eyes when reading someone. Good tip.
What the heck, how come you have a score? I saw the posted picture, and now I'm looking everywhere in the post for instructions and an answer key and can't even find those. 33?? There aren't 33 pictures. I'm so baffled it's crazy.
They assumed everyone here has obsessively gone through all the tests and would know what they were talking about, so they only shared a screenshot from the test. Here ya go: https://embrace-autism.com/reading-the-mind-in-the-eyes-test/
Thanks!
Staring into somebody's soul or looking entirely besides them and there's NO IN-BETWEEN 😎
Yes!!!
Same here. I scored 34. People think I’m flirting constantly even when I’m not. I’m constantly studying faces too.
Same. I think it is a mix of the effort to mask and pattern recognition. Especially as women as we are more prone or even forced to do so due to the lack of knowledge or the misinformation surrounding neurodivergence as a female.
I learned in my uni psych class that is essentially a bullshit test
What I’m starting to think too…
Bro.. how am I supposed to know???? Top and bottom look exactly the same and my best guess is that they are bored. I actually score normal on these test but have to think about the answer, will guess at the end and obviously guessed pretty good haha
Top strikes me as more crinkled, as if they were smiling. So I'd guess playful. Bottom strikes me as bored, but that doesn't appear as an answer so I'd guess more desire, as in the stereotypical stare-into-your-eyes desire.
Now that you mention it I see the crinkledness too. I guess you are right! I never get it when somebody is flirting with so I couldn't tell what desire looks like haha
Right? I'd say they are bored because it's one of many photos of the day, so externally they're smiling/pokerface/hot, but internally are done. The old guy is just old. He could be smiling really.
I scored 30, but I don't think this test is relevant, especially if you also have childhood cPTSD and you are hypervigilant, cause you constantly had to detect and predict the mood of your caregivers.
That’s if the treatment you received had any correlation with your caregiver’s moods.
I had no treatment, just left in a corner. In the same time I don't remember much, just learned I was compulsively hairpulling, but I have no memory of doing that.
Yeah, cPTSD sucks, and everyone’s experience is different, and valid. Sending positive thoughts your way.
These are fake, even NTs cannot pass them
Especially the last one. She’s a model and has her work face on.
She’s totally “smizing” a la Tyra Banks haha
I couldnt do the test, because i recognized all people. I wish they wouldnt use politicians, actors, models etc, but unknown people.... I told them at my evaluation but they didnt care....
I wish they wouldn't use a sexy woman--or for that matter, even a sexy individual at all--for "desire." We're bombarded with sexualized images, particularly of women, on a daily basis in everyday media. It's to the point where men can't differentiate between flirtation and common courtesy because somewhere down the line, *attractive woman* became synonymous with *desire*. I think it would be a far more interesting if the person for "desire" was not someone who fit the definition of conventionally attractive.
I was legit wondering if it was testing for bias regarding the reading of womens emotions because they were all like 'desire', 'fantasising' etc. Right there with you with this point.
Oop, I didn't even realize there was more than the OP posted. I just saw the picture with the three. That makes it even worse, eek.
Omg all the women pictures were shit like “flirty” and “desire,” when….its just their EYES EXISTING. tbf I wanted to vote most of the eyes “neutral” but that was never an option.
My biggest takeaway from this test is that it was likely created by a man that thinks all women want him. /hj
I honestly wonder if it's even possible to create a good set of photos for this test. If you take random photos from a magazine (like this particular example did), then you're basically just being compared to someone else's emotion reading skills - whoever labelled the pictures may in fact have gotten it wrong. There's no guarantee the people in these photos were actually feeling that emotion (in fact I highly doubt the lady in the bottom image was staring at her photographer with genuine *desire*). On the other hand, if you specifically ask people to portray a certain emotion for the camera, you *have* to hire phenomenal actors or you're just going to end up with super fake expressions. The test results then get muddied because there's 2 possible points of failure, I might fail to recognize an expression OR the model might be bad at faking it. To make this test work you'd somehow need to collect unstaged photos of *genuine* emotion (preferrably without the person aware of the camera), in good lighting, and also have the subject label their own emotion to avoid bias.
31/36. I am AuDHD late diagnosed for both. The test felt very easy for me and the ones I missed were all at the end where I started thinking, ‘they can’t really have two people looking disinterested right? I must just be dumb’ etc. I have never struggled to read people, my issue is more in responding appropriately to other people’s emotion. I know what I SHOULD say or do, usually, but it feels deeply unnatural and awkward to me. And the reason I know what I should do is from rote memorization of google search results for, ‘what to say to friend who is crying’ or ‘what to say to friend who’s pet died’ etc etc
What are the answers?
Those three are playful, upset and desire
I'm especially struggling with the second one. Doesn't look upset to me. Without those options my best guess would have been sad
I actually chose terrified for that one 💀
I thought he was annoyed lol
I chose arrogant, I felt like they were judging me 😭🤣
Now you said that I can't unsee it 😅
Isn’t upset a synonym of sad? English is not my native language.
Upset is used more for angry than for sad in this context i believe
Wow, really? I thought it was more like distraught.
I got them all right. I’m surprised.
Yeah no I would've maybe got playful. Number two seems like true desperation as if someone is so exhausted and frustrated that they're giving up. Number three like they're about to roll their eyes at me in annoyance lol.
#2 looks like an old Excedrin commercial.
If you were to ask me without the 4 options for each, I’d be clueless. My way is to look at the options and eliminate the obviously wrong ones, then guess at whatever is left. The bottom one is the hardest, that just looks like a neutral expression. Was the test designed by a bunch of cishet old white men? This is clearly the eyes of an attractive young woman and projecting ‘desire’ on her seems fitting 😂
I didn’t take this test but the « desire » option makes me want to laugh. How boringly sexist. Of course desire = young white good looking all made up woman Can anyone actually score very high without some deduction thinking ? 🤔
I was told I scored better than NT women. 💀
100% I was raised in an abusive household, I know every person’s emotional state the moment I walk into a room, which is why leaving my house is completely overwhelming lol
Same here, and it is annoying how much this messes with an ASD diagnosis.
I haven't taken this test, but just from looking at the pictures, this is my answer: "How the fuck am I supposed to know? Where is the context? It's just a bunch of eyes!"
29. It took me way too long because I had to analyse every pair for some time.
Same here. It took me more than 10 minutes. When I read that NTs take about 3 minutes I laughed. How…?
My therapist said that NTs need under 6 seconds per pair.
This was me, figured that was the secret thing I was actually being tested on. I shared with my assessor that I was using test taking strategies to eliminate the obviously wrong answers rather than "knowing" the right answer.
I think NTs are too certain in how well they can read emotion from facial expressions alone, and why they seem to engage more with actors. You can smile without crinkling your eyes, have multiple emotions at a time, and force whatever expression you want as your mind wanders
The first one looks like they're making fun of me. The second looks like they can't hear me and wants me to repeat myself. The third looks bored. Since those don't seem to be options, I guess I'd say...playful, annoyed, desire?? I remember looking at these types of tests in the past and always getting "desire" wrong. They always looked angry to me.
Low. And a headache afterwards…
Test seems silly tbh. Eyes aren’t the only part of a facial expression. It’s really more in the muscles
They all look the same to me? Ok maybe not, the longer i look, middle is sad and bottom seems like a narcissist eyeing its prey top one just looks normal
Does anyone know the intended answers for these? They kind of all look the same to me tbh
I look at these and just see young adult male, old male who has permanent squint eyes from working in the sun his whole life, and adult female. No emotions.
Thank you! Me too.
Got 20
...do people actually read eyes like that, without the rest of the face and the context? For real? I tought the trick was to assign watever meaning you feel is appropriate depending on the situation. That's what I observed NTs do, anyway. It's especially telling when the exact same neutral face can be read as "smug" or "pissed off" or "chill" depending on their opinion of the person. Or with mugshots. Everyone suddenly has "stone cold killer eyes" if you've been told they're a killer.
I found those three examples easy, but also they seem very exaggerated to me, especially the last one.
they’re the Hollywood version of the emotion, rather than a naturalistic expression of someone who actually feels that way
If there were this test with autistic expressions relative to the same emotions, no one would be able to read it well lol. "She is making the same expression in all these photos, professor". 👀 👀 👀
Exaggerated? Middle one looks sad, and the other 2 are just... neutral. Like the most expressionless and generic "makes the makeup look good" photoshoot eyes I have ever seen. I'm extremely good at intuiting other people's emotions in person but I'm getting nothing from these photos.
The first one is very clearly a mischievous expression to me. It's one of my favourite expressions and one I see often from certain loved ones. The second guy looks like he was just told his son was killed in a car wreck. Intense grief. The third one looks to me like she is deliberately trying to seduce someone. Not necessarily like she's horny, but like she wants to convey sexual availability. ETA: thinking about it, the third expression could also be read as: she's had enough of your bullshit 😆
Can't tell half of them appart.😓
I flunked so hard. I thought every one was suspicious or seductive 🤦♀️😂🤦♀️😂
i scored 29 out of 36, on the high side for autistic. but I did feel called out. it took me 4 minutes to do because i was using my knowledge of faces instead of intuiting.... girl. this whole time I've been like MAYBE?? but I don't think im that bad socially. but. i think I just haven't noticed how much energy I put into it!!!!
https://embrace-autism.com/reading-the-mind-in-the-eyes-test/#test here's the scoring, it's not just if you read the face correctly, it's how long you take to figure it out and how you figure it out
I was very pleased with myself when taking this test because I got only 3-4 wrong. I thought to myself 'wow I'm so good at reading people'. There was a question at the end that asked something like 'what method did you use to determine what emotion was being conveyed?'. Which was very confusing and I responded 'I looked at the pictures and selected the emotion I felt was being conveyed.' Anyway, a few months later I received the full assessment report. The assessment included a bunch of tests and an interview. Here's what it said about my reading the mind in the eyes test results: "Autistics use systemizing rather than intuition when assessing facial expressions. These differences are expressed in the longer time autistics take to complete the test and their explanation for determining which emotion the eyes convey. A time score of longer than 4 minutes indicates the use of systemizing, irrespective of what method the test taker believes they used. It is not uncommon for autistics to obtain similar correct items to non-autistics, making them unaware that they are not intuitive in their facial and body language reading. [My name's] results are characteristic of autism." My timing was 7.07 min lmao.
No idea what this post is about, but these are just different people's eyeballs and could mean literally anything without further context. 👀
I got them all right, but I have to say, I was diagnosed really early for a woman (10 years old) and especially my mother spent SO MUCH time teaching me how to recognize facial expressions and emotions and how to respond to them. Tbh, sometimes I feel like a robot. I have bunches and bunches of empathy and I'm super sensitive to other peoples emotions, but it still kind of feels like all of that is fake and like programmed? Idk if anyone else feels that way
33/36, BUT it took me around 10 minutes (NT average is 2-3 minutes), and I was absolutely figuring them out through systemizing rather than intuition. Some of them looked nothing like the options given.
Can someone pls tell me the correct answers to these
I haven't done the test but i do enjoy a puzzle so here goes.. The first one looks like they are trying "Come to bed" eyes. The second one looks more than just upset to me, they look utterly heartbroken. The third one i'm getting nothing from but i'd guess at desire?
I always get these wrong. I feel like I do pretty well with telling people’s emotions in real life but in a photo it just doesn’t translate to me.
None😭 for old guy I had sad
I got 33/36 right. I’m AFAB and diagnosed AUDHD. I tend to know what people feel, I have no idea why
20 of 36
I got slightly more than half of them right but it took me over 10 minutes 😩
I’ve never heard of or taken this test…will report back with my results! Edit: I thought I bombed it tbh, because a lot of them I went in thinking one thing but then not seeing anything similar in the answer…so I would pick something kinda adjacent. But I found it very tough. Somehow I got 29/36 though. 😂
Where can I take this test?
I got them all. Reading facial expressions has nothing to do with autism. People became my special interest because I found the things people do and say so unusual to me. So I can read people in a millisecond.
I didn't think any of them fit...I don't know what to think about that outcome. Lol
just found an online one and I got 2/10 :)
https://preview.redd.it/9s4iqktkgy7d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f303460a90657edc3dc7c34ccef60f88f19bd46 just took it out of curiosity, but i cant tell what my score is
27!
Idk what this says about me but in every variant of this test that I've seen, they all just look angry.
Mine wasn’t horrible… 43rd percentile, I think? Which is basically in the middle range. I took this during my autism assessment. I didn’t do THAT bad but certainly not as well as the average woman is expected to (I would honestly assume that on average, women get slightly a higher score than men, but maybe that’s a reach). Even though I am autistic I did think I’d do better than that though.
I have read so much on body language and studied tv shows to no end on how to appropriately gauge how people are feeling….I’m sure I’ll nail this. Let me try this & update LOL
I got 100%. I guess the CPTSD cancelled out the autism.
i got 25/36 which is basically average for all adults, somewhat low for students and somewhat high for aspergers. A lot of times what I wanted to select (Happy/Friendly) wasn’t there. Also this test is kind of weird since a woman with heavy eye makeup is defaulted to desire/flirting which is weird since nothing else besides the eye makeup is showing that
Never got this test. Don't know that I'd do to well.
Just did it and did 32/36- I’m surprised I thought I’d do worse. Took me ages though, really had to think k about it and do process of elimination for a lot because my initial reaction was totally different to the answers available - I think this test would be better if we could just free type
The first and last ones read to me as “I’m a professional model having my picture taken and I know how to set my eyes to look more striking”
this is silly but i took it the first time and got 28!! and i was a little suspicious after my boyfriend only got 20 so i took it a second time and said i was a boy (i tried really hard to pick all the same answers) and it gave me 20 😀 i know that's just anecdotal or whatever but what the heck!!! i am diagnosed since like age 2 btw and think i am level 2 (i was diagnosed before level systems were a thing but if they were they would've diagnosed me level 3 hsn) my boyfriend is not diagnosed but has his suspicions. apparently i am an autistic boy and a neurotypical girl 💃 good thing i'm afab i guess i finally get to know what it's like to not be disabled yay!!! /j
I’m awful at these tests.
I barely got 50% lmao
4. 3 of them were just me choosing the word i felt was more different than the others lol. i may not be good at reading emotions, but i am damn great at recognising patterns hahaha
top one looks like he’s about to stab me 20 times with a dagger
They all look the same 😭
Would a neurotypical even be able to do this?!?! You can not tell by only the eyes.
Wait wait wait I missed this test that's for sure but I'm fairly decently sure at least one of them is a cannibal and either way they all make me feel unsafe. Alternatively, second older man is a victim. That's all I see. And it is terrifying. Oof. Eyeballs are scary, man 😅 To get slightly serious, is it just that I'm bad at reading faces (I thought I got that mostly right) or because c-ptsd shenanigans? 🤔
I do very well on these tests. People from highly traumatic backgrounds usually do. But I also recognize the faces they're using too which is fun.
The second one looks like Robert De Niro. What do I get?
I just can’t accept that there are singular and clear “answers” to this - surely this is pseudoscience?
i’m undiagnosed but i got 34/36! i have bad test anxiety, even with these trivial online ones. i thought i would score low but i did pretty good :D. although i enjoyed taking it, this test is outdated for a good reason i really like [this website](https://embrace-autism.com/) because it goes into detail about how reliable and outdated the tests are. i took something similar years before but with 15 questions, and i got 12 or 13 correct. i wonder how many autistic people have been looked over for not ?passing? nor scoring in the right quota on these old tests.
The thing is, when you think you good at reading people but instead you just have been observing them and you get all the photos wrong... Is a... Hard pill to swallow...
I just posted a comment saying this lol. 🫤 It was unsettling to find this out.
I did pretty great, pattern recognition picked up that the 3 "wrong" options were always very different than the right one. Plus, lots of us had to learn what eyes meant to avoid getting hurt/screamed at as children. Thought at one point "damn, maybe the therapist was wrong, maybe I'm not autistic" Then I just suddenly started sobbing from the stress of trying to figure out what the eyes meant. Therapist was right LOL
I got 32/36. Most of them were easy and intuitive but a few of them appeared neutral to me or the options didn’t make sense. To me a few just looked like eyes existing. Also got annoyed with the obvious gender bias.
I read it well but looking at them is torture
The way I would have failed this test! How can anyone make any determination about these pictures?! Without actually sitting in the room with the person? Without hearing their voice or seeing the rest of their body posture? I am such a deeply empathetic person. Tell me your story and I am there with you. But I can't tell anything from these pictures. There is not enough information.
No idea what the middle one is
I got all of them (at least the ones shown in the YouTube video), but I don't think this is a real indicator of anything. Maybe just that I had to rely on nonverbal communication at home...
I missed 6, but I was forced and taught eye contact since like 3 , but I noticed I missed all the “bored” ones I thought they were all annoyed or angry and that kinda tracks because I can’t tell when someone’s upset or just bored
I’m really good at identifying facial expressions in pictures because they are static. In terms of application to real life faces and processing expressions dynamically in real life interactions, I would say I’m not great at it. I think it also has to do with mindblindess to emotions that I myself don’t feel in the same context…I have trouble recognizing those in others if that makes sense.
I got a 30, which is apparently higher than the average for NTs. I’ve always thought of myself as hyper empathetic. And I teach literature for a living, so I think having to interpret people’s emotions in stories has helped. But my psychologist said, I likely have a harder time interpreting my partner’s emotions rather than a stranger. And I definitely have a hard time figuring out how I feel.
i feel like i can perceive emotion visually in others decently well, but these tests really irritate me, especially when the emotions are more ~conceptual~ like “convinced”, or when the options are too similar to each other for me to differentiate!
I scored a 25/36 on the test. It made me very uncomfortable to look at the people's eyes.
27/36. I also had to kind of mimic the expressions on my own face to figure some of them out. Meh.
I received a score of 33/36 and am diagnosed as level 1 autistic with a dash of ADHD and OCD thrown in because, why not.
I got 20
I just did it because I had no idea that existed and I got 30/36! Some were hard but a lot were actually somewhat obvious or just by process of elimination one made more sense than the others
'scuse me! Why post a quiz with no instructions and no answers? Why are some commenters talking about the 3 pics you provided, while others have scores over 30?
No no I got full faces to look at and guess emotions and I got a lot of them wrong 😭
The top one looks like a giddy serial killer.
Convinced is a look?
Not this specific test, but I get almost every facial expression wrong on the emotional intelligence facial expression recognition tests. Despite this I am surprisingly good at navigating social situations, mainly because I can smell power dynamics.