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Baron-Cohen (1997) - Coggle Diagram
Baron-Cohen (1997)
Sample
16 adults with either autism of Asperger’s syndrome (13m; 3f), recruiter via an advert in the National Autistic Society’s Communication magazine or through professional contacts of Baron-Cohen
50 normal adults (25m; 25f), recruited from the general population of Cambridge, UK, where Baron-Cohen was based
10 adults with Tourette’s syndrome (8m; 2f), recruited from London. This was added as an additional control group as Tourette’s is similar to autism in being a childhood-onset disorder that has a disruptive effect on childhood interactions
Findings
Adults with autism did worse in the Eyes Task (mean score of 16.3/25) than either the ‘normal’ adults (20.3/25) or the adults with Tourette’s syndrome (20.4/25)
This suggested that deficit in Theory of Mind persists into adulthood for people with autism, and the Eyes Task is a test that can pick this up
Within the ‘normal’ group, females performed better than males on the Eyes Task (mean score of 21.8/25 vs 18.8/25), supporting ‘folk psychology’ claims about females being better at reading other people’s emotions than males
Validity
Ecological
Figuring out emotions from static, black & white images of eyes is not common
Population
The sample was diverse in terms of age and gender but lacked diversity in terms of diagnosis and ethnicity
Concurrent
They compared the new test (the eyes task) with an established test (strange stories) to check it was accurate.
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Reliability
Internal
There was a high number of controls used in the eyes task (same size images, 3 seconds each,all black and white, all participants viewed the same images, etc.).
External
Large sample of participants in normal population but the sample of autistic/AS participants and Tourette’s participants was fairly small and so may not produce consistent findings.
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