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.
I agree. This felt like a test of whether or not one is conditioned to recognize how actors use their eyes to express certain emotions rather than a test of how well one can empathize with the feelings of others in the real world.
32. At least those responding corroborate your prediction. Could be self-selection. Those I got wrong I spent too much time analyzing, might have selected the "correct" answer if I had acted quicker. Does that corroborate Dunning-Kruger a bit?
EDIT: Reading further in the comments quite a few folks revealed a lower score. Actually that should not be too surprising, since some number of high-achieving, socially awkward types find fulfillment in hacking (Bill Gates).
I was extremely surprised by this, I had at times almost gone so far as self diagnosing myself with aspergers due to my complete lack of interest in all things touchy feely and human, but hey; 35/36.
33. at first, I thought that it was just faking me out & telling me I was right on all of them. usually, I don't notice details about people very easily (gained/lost weight, new haircut, etc), unless I make a conscious effort to concentrate on such details. Perhaps that could be another contributing factor between the results and what one might expect.
Just adding my score of 32, which was a surprise. And quite a confidence boost. Just hope the test results aren't rigged. They ya go, over-thinking things.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I found it interesting that, of the faces that I misidentified, all but one of them was female. It would be interesting to know if the statistics point to a significant difference in performance depending on the gender of the participant and the gender of the person's face being viewed. I got a 29 overall.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
One little bit of difficulty I had was that, while the original image was a bit too small, the zoomed-in one was (I felt) too big - I would have preferred an image size somewhere in-between.
Agreed. Also, with the image zoomed in, I could no longer see the options, so the entire test was far too taxing UI-wise. And I can't remember my exact score and after clicking Next can't get back to it, even though I assumed I could because it had a Back button before that. I was expecting more information about the score after clicking Next, but all it did was close. And it's unnecessarily in Flash.
This seems very poor for a site that appears to sell software with which to make quizzes.
While it's possible that I do have Asperger's (and I'd be interested to know if I did), I'm not sure how this properly tests anything. I know that Asperger's is sometimes characterised by a lack of understanding of social nuances and non-verbal expression, but how often do people have to react to only eyes as opposed to all facial expressions, supported by body language and words?
I'd like to know that too. I got 28. The ones I got wrong I'm sure I got wrong because I started to think about it. I'd wonder if the person was smiling for example.
When I didn't think about it, And trusted my instincts and feelings instead. I always got it right. And figured it out almost instantly. But logically I can't explain that. It was like magic.
I got 30 right, but with the exact opposite experience. The 6 I got wrong were the ones I did immediately, and the 30 I got right were the ones I thought about.
>how often do people have to react to only eyes as opposed to all facial expressions, supported by body language and words?
Not often, but supplying only the eyes is a good way to bring the scores down into a more useful range for the test. Assuming that eye-specific recognition ability is a close enough proxy for overall ability, of course.
Personally I don't think this test has anything to do with Asperger's. My feeling is that facial recognition is to some extent an acquired skill like anything else, and that the lowest scores are largely going to go to the people with the least experience in attending to the emotions of others.
>What makes you think that people can control their body language, but not their eyes?
I think it's harder to control both, a disparity between the two suggests something is amiss. Also, "the eyes are the windows of the soul" has some basis in human behaviour IMO.
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.
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.
Really? I didn't feel that at all, although I did get an above-average score in the end. I felt I could name an emotion with most images, but I found it hard to select an appropriate match from the choices given and was often not satisfied with my answer. Some images I could not read at all.
Indeed. I only got a 31, but with the exception of one set of eyes that I completely misread each one I got wrong I was waffling between two answers and the one I didn't pick was the actual correct answer.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.