The eyes test is influenced more by artistic inclination and less by sex.

Paola Guariglia,Gabriella Antonucci,Giusy Miccichè,Laura Piccardi,Flavio Giaimo,Sofia Alaimo

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00292

Abstract

The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test was developed by Baron-Cohen and his co-workers. This test provides them the unique opportunity to evaluate social cognition assessing the ability to recognize the mental state of others using only the expressions around the eyes. In healthy populations, however, it has produced conflicting results, particularly regarding sex differences and number of items to use. In this study we performed two studies: The first one investigated the presence of gender effects and the sensitivity of test stimuli; the second one considered other individual factors (i.e., artistic attitude, social empathy and personality traits) that could influence the ability to understand emotions from gaze. Our results demonstrated a sex effect, which can be more or less attenuated by the nature of the stimuli. This could be as aforementioned the result of the following, empathy or artistic attitude in being proficient in understanding the mental states of others.

Highlights

Reviewed by: Eric Peterson, University of Northern Colorado, USA Dahlia Zaidel, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Empathy is considered to have a crucial role in social interaction, since it allows sharing the social emotions of others (Singer, 2008) contributing to provide crucial information for the adaptation to the world promoting communication and social relationships (Ekman et al, 1987; Ekman, 2009)
We investigated whether artistic aptitude makes individuals more prone to detecting emotions from others’ facial expressions and whether this aptitude is related to higher empathy scores

Summary

Introduction

Reviewed by: Eric Peterson, University of Northern Colorado, USA Dahlia Zaidel, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test was developed by Baron-Cohen and his coworkers This test provides them the unique opportunity to evaluate social cognition assessing the ability to recognize the mental state of others using only the expressions around the eyes. Baron-Cohen and his colleagues (Baron-Cohen et al, 1997a,b, 2001) developed the ‘‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’’ test (RMET), for evaluating social cognition by assessing the ability to recognize mental states of others just by the expression around their eyes This test has been largely used in experimental, neuroimaging and clinical studies to detect differences in emotional attribution due to eye reading in both clinical populations Gender effects in social empathy disorders and social anxiety) and in healthy participants (i.e., to investigate sex-related and age-related changes) (Vellante et al, 2013)

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Conclusion