How well can you read what someone is feeling?

A below-average score means you identified fewer emotions correctly than most adults in the norming sample. This reflects cognitive empathy, which is the ability to identify what someone else is feeling from facial cues. It does not measure whether you care about others' feelings (affective empathy) or how you behave in relationships. Many people with below-average cognitive empathy scores are deeply caring and socially effective. The score can be influenced by fatigue, screen quality, cultural familiarity with emotion labels, and attention during the test. A single sitting is a snapshot, not a definitive measure of your empathic capacity.

No. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test was developed as a research tool, not a diagnostic instrument. While studies show that autistic adults score lower on average (19 to 22 of 36 versus 26 to 28 of 36 for neurotypical adults), there is substantial overlap between the two distributions. Many autistic people score in the average or above-average range, and many neurotypical people score below average. Autism spectrum conditions are diagnosed through comprehensive clinical assessment involving developmental history, behavioural observation, and standardised interviews. A score on this test, whether high or low, cannot confirm or rule out autism.

On the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test specifically, a meta-analysis by Kirkland et al. (2013) found that women score approximately 1.5 to 2 points higher than men on average. This is a small but statistically reliable difference. The gap is consistent across studies but explains only a small proportion of the total variation in scores. Many individual men outscore the female average, and many individual women score below the male average. The difference may reflect a combination of socialisation, practice with emotion reading, and biological factors, but the relative contribution of each is debated in the literature.

Yes, but with caveats. Research shows that scores improve with repeated exposure to the test, partly because you learn the specific photographs and foil patterns. Broader training in emotion recognition, such as programmes designed for autistic individuals, can also improve performance on similar tasks. However, it is unclear how much improvement on this specific test transfers to real-world emotion reading. Real social situations provide far more cues than a cropped photograph of eyes, including voice tone, body language, and context. The test is best used as a one-time benchmark rather than a training exercise.

The original Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen et al. 2001) uses photographs from the Cambridge Autism Research Centre that are copyrighted and require written permission for commercial use. The Multiracial Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Olderbak et al. 2015) was developed as an improved version with greater racial and ethnic diversity in the photographs, better psychometric properties, and an open-access licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). Using the MRMET allows us to provide a valid, well-normed test while complying with licensing requirements and representing a broader range of faces.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to identify and understand what another person is feeling. It is sometimes called perspective-taking or mentalising. Affective empathy is the tendency to share or mirror another person's emotional state, to feel distressed when they are distressed or happy when they are happy. This test measures only cognitive empathy: can you accurately read the emotion shown in someone's eyes? A person can have high cognitive empathy (accurate at reading emotions) but low affective empathy (not moved by what they detect), or vice versa. The two capacities are related but distinct, and they are governed by partially different brain networks.

Culture can influence performance on emotion recognition tasks. Some research suggests that people are slightly more accurate at reading emotions from faces of their own racial or ethnic group, a phenomenon called the in-group advantage. The MRMET was specifically designed to address this by including photographs of people from multiple racial backgrounds, which reduces but may not eliminate cultural bias. Emotion labels can also carry slightly different connotations across cultures. The normative data is predominantly from Western samples, so percentile comparisons are most accurate for people from similar cultural backgrounds.

A very low score on a single administration of this test is not cause for alarm. It may reflect factors such as fatigue, distraction, unfamiliarity with the emotion vocabulary, screen quality, or simply an off day. If you are concerned about your ability to read social cues in daily life, and this concern is consistent and persistent, speaking with a psychologist who specialises in social cognition or neurodevelopmental assessment may be helpful. A single test score is one data point, not a diagnosis. Many people with below-average cognitive empathy function well socially using other skills and compensatory strategies.