How to read ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ | Notes and Records | The Royal Society
Chloe Silverman; How to read ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’. Notes Rec. 20 December 2022; 76 (4): 683–697. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0058 Download citation file: Reading the Mind in the Eyes is a psychometric test first published by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues in 1997 and revised in 2001. It was designed to measure subjects' ‘mentalizing’ ability, or their capacity to attribute cognitive and emotional states to others. Although originally developed and used for autistic adults, this instrument has proven remarkably durable in the succeeding two decades. This is notable for several reasons. The instrument itself is a historical artefact composed of cropped photographs from 1990s-era commercial magazines. Researchers have also noted that it may measure emotional vocabulary better than emotion recognition. In the decades following its publication, the theory underpinning the test, that autistics lack components of the ability to empathize, has been critiqued both by autism re