On the RMET
Eyes are the window to the...?
In my assessment, my Dr pulled out a booklet with a corresponding word sheet. On every page was a set of eyes displaying an expression, with 4 written descriptors at each corner edge.
Figure 1: a personalized rendition of an RMET example
The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test was created by Simon Baron Cohen and colleagues in 1997 that was meant to assess ‘theory of Mind’—the ability to mentalize in adults with AS or HFA* Mentalizing can be understood as social intelligence, the ability to intuit how other people are doing/feeling based on an outward expression, like eyeball movement.
Baron Cohen proposed that Autistic people had little to no Theory of Mind which is why we struggle with empathy, don’t pick up on social cues or bids and generally have a hard time meshing in with social expectations. Eye Contact is a big deal it seems. It’s all about “reading” people without having to develop your own manual for doing so like researching body language, mimicking fictional characters or choosing to literally study humans for 20 years like I did with drawing and anatomy.
Naturally, I aced it.
I wasn’t surprised. This test is static. I paused when my Dr started the test. I wondered, should I tell them I have spent 100’s of hours drawing and analyzing art to understand how to best represent emotion in my own work? I coached myself, I taught myself, I watched the same animations over and over looking for the details. I know how to make emotion because I’ve studied it. In fact, many of my early works of people have that 1000 yard stare.
Figure 2: Self portrait done in one of my sketchbooks when I attended the last portion of Art School in 2009-2011
Off the page though, is when shit gets real. When you are forced to read tone, body language, room vibe, listen for spaces in speech, gain eye contact to scan the face for something under time or context pressure is a totally different thing. Add onto this a bizarre overlay of constantly feeling everyone is mad at you-as if you’re the epicentre of everyones life-socializing is just really terrible and confusing.
The grave chasms in my reciprocal understanding of “appropriate” empathy or response never has anything to do with looking people in the eye. If anything, I found the images presented in the RMET to not even reflect the “mood” the eye actors were delivering. There were so many better words-more specific, effective words-that I could actually think of to describe the emotions because “Happy” was too broad.
I knew my results wouldn’t indicate anything. But really, it kinda feels like a clown of a test for an Artist who based her work on words and pictures. I’ve been practicing for so long how to build emotional story, to say things visually without speaking, using metaphors and extrapolations, searching the environment for clues about the interior self, reading about cinematic framing as a powerful emotional device. Of course I know Eyes. Art taught it to me.
Figure 3: Part of Scott McCloud’s face dictionary, giving me recipes for expression.
I’ve been drawing people since Greys Anatomy (the book) fell my hands in grade 12. I became obsessed, consumed with needing to understand how the body all goes together. Years later, a friend gifted me Making Comics by Scott McCloud and I had an absolute epiphany seeing the face equations mapped out according to feeling. Where has this guide been all my life? This isn’t just going to make my art better, this actually helps me irl. It didn’t occur to me that that may have been an odd thought.
Another night, another random rabbit hole led me to lip reading videos online. I was surprised at my results. How did I lip read well? Do I…not look at eyes? When Pedro Pascal was having his moment in the early Spring of 2023, I was hit with fan videos discussing his expressive eyes, the soulful, mournful, jesting looks he could encompass with any of his roles. Wow, never noticed that. To me, his mouth is so much more impactful.
When I was teaching myself how to draw, I learned very quickly that getting the right lift to a line, curve to a gesture or pressure to the page could be the defining factor on wether your portrait likeness was a hit or a miss. One off angle and your entire drawing is messed. I was comforted deeply when reading in The Artists Guide to Figure Drawing that it was not uncommon to re-draw a mouth 20 times to get it right. Even in my own personal life studies, it was the mouth, the mouth, the mouth.
I have said this from the beginning: my ability to make art or ‘express myself’ belied the intensity of my struggle to understand myself and others. It was my only way of knowing how to communicate because I could not verbally do so and did not equate to me being ‘empathic’ or ‘deeply in tune’. I was fucked and trying to figure it out. At a loss to assign words to feelings, feelings to body indicators like so many therapists LOOOOOVE to do-I could not explain that I cant feel my body this way. What may look like ‘tuning in’ is actually a cognitive process looking for patterns and then analyzing them to come to a conclusion. There is no intuition. When I draw myself screaming or crying, I cant tell you why until it’s on the page and I can assess it. And still, it takes time if I am even interested in doing so.
Charcoal drawings from 2015 where the entire theme of the zine was hiding from eyesight. This is what I mean when I say all my everything was visible in my artwork.
The RMET is an interesting premise. In some instances, it probably helps build a picture but I guess this is what they mean when Autism is a spectrum. Being able to identify stilted emotion did not save me from a score of Severe on the SRS-2. I think this speaks to the idea that even in a clinical setting, you should not be taking one administration as an answer. Having an assessment done by a reasonable, evidence based clinician is detective work and I was goddamn, lucky as fuck to be diagnosed by the Dr. I was.
I will never say the 30+ year wait was worth it, but I do feel empowered to claim that I deserved to be truly seen the way I was in their office, which is starting to serve as a salve to the decades I had to live, invisible and suffering.