The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test: Investigation of Psychometric Properties and Test-Retest Reliability of the Persian Version.
The Persian Eyes test keeps its rank order of people but its items do not stick together, so use it only as a loose screen.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team translated the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test into Persian.
They gave it twice to a small adult group to check if scores stay stable.
They also looked at whether women and men answer differently.
What they found
Scores stayed fairly stable between the two test days.
But the items did not hang together well; internal consistency was low.
Women scored higher than men, just like in the English version.
How this fits with other research
Golan et al. (2007) did the same kind of check on the voice version and got good separation between autistic and typical adults.
Garwood et al. (2021) later found strong internal consistency for the child face-voice battery, while Nickerson et al. (2015) found poor internal consistency for the Persian eyes-only form. The difference shows the child full battery is more reliable than the adult eyes-only set.
Howard et al. (2023) warn that many ABA tools lack solid psychometric backing; this Persian eyes test joins that caution list.
Why it matters
If you need a quick emotion-reading probe for Iranian adults, you can use the Persian Eyes test, but do not trust a single score. Pair it with another measure or watch real social behavior. Keep the gender difference in mind when you compare clients.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The psychometric properties of the Persian "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test were investigated, so were the predictions from the Empathizing-Systemizing theory of psychological sex differences. Adults aged 16-69 years old (N = 545, female = 51.7 %) completed the test online. The analysis of items showed them to be generally acceptable. Test-retest reliability, as measured by Intra-class correlation coefficient, was 0.735 with a 95 % CI of (0.514, 0.855). The percentage of agreement for each item in the test-retest was satisfactory and the mean difference between test-retest scores was -0.159 (SD = 3.42). However, the internal consistency of Persian version, calculated by Cronbach's alpha (0.371), was poor. Females scored significantly higher than males but academic degree and field of study had no significant effect.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2015 · doi:10.1007/s10803-015-2427-4