Tuesday, 28 November 2017

Baron Cohen's autism in adults study (1997)


Background/context

Autism = a lifelong disorder diagnosed in childhood

Autistic spectrum = struggle to understand others' behaviour, issues with language delay, lack of imagination

Savants = high functioning autistic people

Theory of mind = mind blindness is not understanding how others think or what emotions they feel

Appe found that people with aspergers had worse theory of mind

Tourettes syndrome = causes severe disruption to education and relationships, it involves movement or vocal tics and is usually socially inapropriate 


Aim

To test whether Savants and people with Tourettes would struggle with theory of mind tasks, compared to 'normal' people


Method

Natural experiment, because the IV's were either austisic people, tourettes sufferers and normal people

The dv= performance on the eyes task

The eyes task was 25 photos of black and white male and female eyes, and the p's were given 2 choices between 2 mental states or emotions that the eyes were showing

Matched participants, matched by age


Procedure

Group 1= 16 high functioning autistic or asperger's individuals, recruited through an advert

Group 2= 50 normal adults, age matched to group 1, recruited from Cambridge

Group 3= 10 adults with tourette's, age matched also, recruited from a centre in London

The eyes, gender recognition and basic emotion tasks were presented in random orders to p's as well as a strange stories task

Examples of strange stories tasks =


P's were tested at their own homes or in a clinic, or at a lab at Cambridge


Findings

Strange stories task = asking children about emotions and the intentions of characters in the stories

                                 mean score               range
Austistic/aspergers         16.3/25                 13-23
normal                           20.3/25                 16-25
tourettes                       20.4/25                 16-25

The scores for the tourettes group was not that different to the normal group, but both scored significantly higher than the A/A group

There was no difference between gender and emotions in the groups

No correlation between IQ and the eyes task performance results for A/A/ group


Conclusions

Results = A/A have impaired theory of mind, and this is independent of general intelligence because some from that group had university degrees


Evaluation

Research method- controlled settings so high validity
Low ecological validity
Groups may not have been well matched

Data type- quant., so easy comparison but no qual. data of how they felt or their thought processes

Ethics- volunteers, not deceived not distressed

Validity- controlled conditions, not realistic tasks but they had the extra strange stories task 

Reliability- Standardised tasks and photos, and same time showing each one = consistency, high internal reliability and easy to replicate

Sample- sampling bias because there was only 3 females, so androcentric and un-generalisable, volunteer sample so lower validity there
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