Baron Cohen Flashcards
(12 cards)
Outline the background to Baron Cohen et al
AUTISM- is a disorder that involves difficulties in three areas (triad of impairments’
-social communication (taking things people say literallly)
-social interaction (difficulty understanding or using non verbal body language)
-social imagination (difficulty dealing with changes in routine
-signs that a child is autistic typically appear before 3 meaning that it is a childhood onset disorder. Diagnosed more frequently in males than females
Autism is generally described as a spectrum disorder reflecting the way in which the precise combination of difficlies can vary between autists
-Baron Cohen had long been interested in whether there was a core deficit that was common to all people with autism, he established that theory of mind is usually an area that children with autism usually struggle with
Outline what is meant by theory of mind
The ability to recognise what someone is thinking or feeling
Outline the aim of Baron Cohen
To investigate whether adults with autism still experience a lack of theory of mind
To develop a new advanced way of testing theory of mind that would be appropriate for adults (and not be vulnrable to th ceiling effect)
Outlie what is meant by the cieling effect
-when a test is too easy that it does not reveal the full extent of someones ability/deficit
Outline the sample of Baron Cohen
-16 adults with AUTISM or ASPERGERS syndrome
13 m 3 f
-50 normal adults recruited from the general population of cambridge
-10 adults with tourettes syndrome
Outline the procedure used by Baron Cohen et al
READING THE MIND IN THE EYES TASK
-each participant was shown 25 pairs of eyes
- in black and white
- 3 seconds each
- 2 semantically opposite words/ phrases best described what the person was thinking or feeling e.g ‘calm or anxious’
-There were further tests carried out to make sure that it was theory of mind that was being tested
-Strange stories task
-gender recognition test
-basic emotional recognition test
Outline how Baron Cohen made sure it was measuring theory of mind
STRANGE STORIES TASK
-this had already been validated as a test for theory if mind
-if scores on eyes task were similair to the scores on the strange stories task (this would result in high concurrent validity)
However strange stories task was made for 8-9 year olds so may be a risk of having ceiling effect
GENDER RECOGNITION TASK
-identify the gender of the pictures in the eyes task
BASIC EMOTION RECOGNITION TASK
-recognise the 6 basic emotions from photos of full faces (e.g happiness, sadness , disgust)
If the gender recognition or the basic emotion emotion task is failed, the participant would not comp;ete he eyestask as it is a lot harder than those two tasks
Outline the findings from Baron Cohen
-adults with autism did worse in the eyes task (mean score 16.3/25) than either normal adults 20.3/25 or the adults with tourettes 20.4/25
What did the people with autism get on the eyes tas out of 25
mean score 16.3/25
what did the ‘normal’ people get on the eyes task out of 25
mean score 20.3/25
what did the people with tourettes get on the eyes task
mean score 20.4/25
Outline the conclusion Baron Cohen made from these results
this suggested that the deficit of THEORY OF MIND persists into adulthood for people with autism, and the Eyes task is a test that can pick up on this.
