Anemone's Research Emporium

Autism, psychoticism, and extraversion: the EPQ-R and you.

Non-autistics welcome, too!

Hans Eysenck and colleagues developed a scale, the EPQ-R (100 items), that looked at the underlying personality traits that are reflected in the way different people break down under stress in different ways (when they're under stress). This is a prescriptive scale, rather than the descriptive "big five" scale that is popular right now. The names of the traits psychoticism and neuroticism are derived from two main categories of mental illness: psychosis and neurosis, but scores on these traits do not indicate mental illness. It's your personality they're describing.

For more information on the scale, see here.

A link to this scale has already been posted in a thread on Wrong Planet. If all you want is your scores, do the test, then don't send the email that it generates. Just copy your scores from the pop up message. If you want me to add your scores to my database, send them in (just send the email). Someday if I get enough data I may post summary data. If your browser/email sends them to me automatically and you don't want them included, let me know. If you don't want to enable javascript or for some reason it doesn't work and you want me to send you scores, copy the scale and your answers into an email (no attachments please!) and send them in and I will get back to you with your scores asap.

Have fun!

Autism and extraversion

Many autistic people seem to be introverted (low on E), but there is some confusion among us to whether autism is extreme introversion (extremely low E) or whether it is something else (with many of us just happening to be introverted as well), and whether autistic people can be genuinely extraverted, or do we just feel that way sometimes.

On a recent WP thread, everyone who reported E scores scored below the mean on E. Whether all autistic people are below the mean on E or not remains to be seen, since it's possible that people who are low on E are more likely to do surveys on the internet (response bias) or even just be on the internet more to begin with. (High E people are probably talking on their cell phones instead.) This is where non-autistic people come in handy - we can use you as a comparison group. So join the fun and take the test!

Autism and psychoticism

Hans Eysenck described high P people as "aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal, impulsive, antisocial, unempathic, creative and tough-minded", which sound suspiciously like how autistic people are described. Are autistic people high P? Sometimes? All the time? On the same WP thread, everyone who reported P scores scored above the mean on P. But again, there may be a response bias, with people with unconventional personalities more likely to do personality surveys to begin with. (There probably is a strong response bias, based on my experience elsewhere. Again, this is where non-autistic people come in handy - we can use you as a comparison group. So join the fun and take the test!) So are autistic people high on P? Or do we just look like it? Take the test and find out!

Autism and neuroticism

There doesn't seem to be any relationship between neuroticism on this scale and autism at Wrong Planet.