Reading the Mind in the Eyes

The revised Reading the Mind in the Eyes test of Baron-Cohen and colleagues (2001), the most widely used measure of reading mental states from faces. Each item shows the eye region of a photograph and four words; choose the word that best describes what the person is thinking or feeling. You may feel that more than one word applies, but pick the one that fits best, and read all four before choosing. A practice item comes first and is not scored. Untimed; most people take 5–10 minutes. The score is the number correct out of 36. Your percentile is against the 291,617 English-speaking online volunteers aged 16–70 in Greenberg et al. (2023), who took these same items; women score about 0.7 points higher than men on average, so separate percentiles for each sex are given too. Only the means and standard deviations of that sample are published; the percentiles come from a beta-binomial distribution fitted to them, which respects the 0–36 range and the pile-up near the ceiling that a normal curve would miss. The second reference is the general-population sample of the original Baron-Cohen et al. (2001) paper, 122 British adults (mean 26.2, SD 3.6), whose full score distribution is published and is shown below your result. The test correlates about 0.25 with vocabulary, and a meta-analysis (Kittel, Olderbak & Wilhelm, 2021) finds it closer to emotion perception than to other theory-of-mind measures.