OCR AS Psychology: Core Studies - Baron-Cohen (4)

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  • Created by: Majid
  • Created on: 14-03-13 21:27

Baron-Cohen (4)

Group 1: 16 p's; normal intelligence; 13 men; 3 women; recruited via an advert in the National Autistic Society Magazine; and through clinics; Group 2: 50 age-matched controls; 25 male; 25 female; No history of psychiatric disorder and presumed to be of normal intelligence; Recruited from a subject panel; Group 3: 10 p's with tourette's; recruited from a referral centre in London; Participants age-matched with group 1&2; 8 men; 2 women; mirrored sex ratio of group 1; all normal intelligence.Task 1 (Eyes Task): Eyes task had photo's of the eye region of 25 different male/female faces. Photo's were taken from a magazine and were standardised as they were all black and white, all the same region of the face (midway along the nose to just above the eyebrow) and all the same size. Each image was shown for 3 seconds long. Participants had a forced-choice question between 2 mental states printed under each picture. There was a "correct" word and a "foil" word. The foil word was always the opposite to the correct word.Target terms: Calm; noticing you etc; Foils: anxious, ignoring you etc Task 2 (Strange stories task): In order to check the validity of the eyes task as a theory of mind task, the participants with Autism and Asperger syndrome were tested on Happe's strange stories task. It was argued that if the Eyes Task was indeed measuring theory of mind, then if someone performed poorly on the eyes task, they should perform similarly on the strange stories task. Task 3: (Control) Gender recognition task: This was to check whether deficits on the eyes task was due to other factors. This task involved looking at the same sets of eyes in the eyes task, but identify the gender of the person in the photo. This is a social judgement without mind reading. Task 4: (Control) Basic emotion recognition task: This was an emotional task requiring participants to judge photo's of whole faces displaying 6 basic emotion. e.g happy/sad/angry etc. This was to check for deficits on the eyes task. Only 8 participants in autistic/Asperger condition performed better on this. They were tested individually in a quiet room either in their own home, in a researcher's clinic, or lab at the University

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