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On this page you can find information about how this work relates to various conditions or aspects of social processing and what it means for you.

Trauma

"Trauma is when we experience very stressful, frightening or distressing events that are difficult to cope with or out of our control. It could be one incident, or an ongoing event that happens over a long period of time." - MIND

Our work has been looking at early trauma, i.e. trauma that occurs before the age of 18, which is often caused by Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). ACEs might include experience of:

Physical abuse
Sexual Abuse
Emotional Abuse
Living with someone who abused drugs
Living with someone who abused alcohol
Exposure to domestic violence
Living with someone who has gone to prison
Living with someone with serious mental illness
Losing a parent through divorce, death or abandonment

Specifically, our work has been exploring how people who have this sort of trauma think about others minds differently from people who have not experienced early trauma.

WHAT WE DID

We asked survivors of childhood trauma to share their stories of times they felt misunderstood, angry or uncomfortable. Their stories helped us create a test describing these different scenarios. We then asked people with and without experiences of early trauma to take this test, asking how the person might have felt or what they thought in these situations.

WHAT WE FOUND

We found that people who have experienced early trauma were much more able to understand the minds (i.e. the thoughts and feelings) of other people with early trauma compared to how well people without trauma could understand their minds.

WHY IT MATTERS

This is important for several reasons. First, if you are someone who has experienced early trauma, you may find that there are some people you are much better at understanding than others. SImilarly, you might struggle to understand the point of view of someone who has not experienced trauma, because their mind works differently to yours. If you are a mental health professional, or someone who works to support people who have experienced early trauma, it's worth knowing that their minds are different to yours and you may not experience others in the same way.

Difficulty with recognising faces

WHAT WE KNOW

The ability to recognise other people by their faces is easy and automated from most people. We do it very accurately and very quickly, without thinking about it, and this helps us in our social interactions. It allows us to recognise and identify our friends, family, work colleagues from strangers, for instance.

But imagine you couldn’t do this. Imagine that you walk into a room full of people and you can’t tell whether you know anyone in there or not. Perhaps you know that some friends are meant to be meeting you there, but you can’t tell where they are because you can’t recognise them by their faces. Maybe someone comes up to you to say hello, but you cannot tell whether it’s someone you’ve met before or not by their face; only once they start speaking do you recognise them and realise who they are by the sound of their voice.

These are all real scenarios that some people experience if they struggle to process other people’s faces. Problems with face-processing can feature as part of several different conditions, e.g. Autism and Developmental Prosopagnosia. Regardless of the condition, being less able to recognise people by their face can contribute to social anxiety and can also affect our attachment style and how we establish the groups we belong to.

WHAT WE ASKED

We explored the different processes that some people may be better or worse at that, overall, decide how good they are at recognising other people by their faces.

WHAT WE FOUND

There are three different processes that work together to help us recognise other people by their faces. Some people are better or worse at each of these processes.

FACE PERCEPTION

Face perception is the ability to process visual details of someone’s face, such as their eyes, nose, skin colour and expression, to then store this information in your mind as your representation of their face. It is important that this representation is accurate, else you won’t be able to recognise that face if you see it again.

Imagine you're in a busy coffee shop, and you spot your friend across the room. Even in a crowd, your brain processes their facial features to recognize them. This process helps you understand, "That's my friend," based on how their face looks compared to what you know.

FACE MEMORY

Face memory is your ability to remember and recognise faces you have seen before. It helps you pick out familiar faces from a group or remember someone you met earlier.

Imagine that you attend a party and a few days later you run into one of the guests at the grocery store a few days later. Even though they aren't in the same setting, your face memory allows you to recognise them as someone you met at the party, even though they're among strangers.

FACE MATCHING

Face matching is when you compare two faces and decide if they are of the same person or two different people. It’s used when you're unsure if the two faces you're looking at belong to the same individual or not.

Imagine you’re at the airport, and the customs officer checks your passport. The officer is using face matching to decide whether you are the same person as the one shown in the passport photo.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT DIFFERENT PEOPLE?

Most people will have an average ability to recognise faces and not ever think about it. However, for some people, it plays more of a prominent role in their daily lives, either because they are exceptionally good at face-processing, or find it very difficult.

SUPER RECOGNISERS: Some people have an extraordinary ability to recognise faces and these people are known as ‘super recognisers’. We found that super recognisers have above-average ability in all of the three different processes.

AUTISTIC PEOPLE: Our research suggests that both face perception and face memory are typically impaired if you have autism, but your face matching ability remains intact.

DEVELOPMENTAL PROPAGNOSIA: Some people who struggle to recognise people by their faces are diagnosed with a condition called 'developmental prosopagnosia' which can also be referred to as 'face blindness'. We found that people with this condition struggle with all three of the different processes.

Difficulty with language

What is Developmental Language Disorder and how does it affect the way we think?

Some children have a long-term difficulty with talking and/or understanding words. This can make it more difficult for them to:

pay attention to others and listen to what they say
follow instructions or answer questions
make friends and have good conversations
express their ideas well

If these things are having a big impact on their everyday life, for instance, how well they do at school, and if they cannot be explained by another condition, such as hearing impairment or autism, these children may be diagnosed with a condition called Developmental Language Disorder. This name is often shortened to ‘DLD’.

We’re still not sure what causes DLD, but we know it affects about two children in every classroom in primary school.

Given how important language is to understanding others' minds, we’re asked whether - and how - having DLD can change the way you think or interact with others.

WHAT WE FOUND

EMOTION + FACES

Children with DLD often find it difficult to recognise which emotion a human is feeling based on their facial expression. It is especially difficult when the emotion is a 'complex' emotion, (e.g., surprise or disgust) rather than a simple emotion (e.g. happy or sad).

EMOTION + VOICES

Children with DLD also find it difficult to recognise which emotion a human is feeling based on what they sound like in their voice. This was even harder than recognising emotion from their face.

EMOTION + EMPATHY

Children with DLD also gave lower scores on measures of empathy compared to children the same age who did not have DLD. However, it's important to remember that this does not mean they are less empathetic. It is more likely that these childrens do not recognise the need to empathise as easily because they struggle to recognise another's emotion, from either their face or their voice.

Autism

Autism is a developmental condition which has two main criteria for diagnosis:

- the first is that the individual has difficulties with social interaction and communication;

- the second is that they have a restricted and repetitive range of interests and behaviour.

Traditionally, individuals with autism were thought to lack empathy (a claim which has been discredited) but they have also been thought to be unable to work out what other people are thinking.

As part of our work on this project we have argued that this is not true, rather than autistic individuals having a ‘broken’ ability to work out what others are thinking, we suggest that everyone is worse at working out what others are thinking when they are different from oneself. As a result, one might expect autistic individuals to be better at working out what other autistic people are thinking than non-autistic individuals.

WHAT WE FOUND

Previously, researchers thought that individuals with autism were not able to work out what other people are thinking, and that this explained why they might find social interaction difficult.

We showed that there are problems with this idea. For a start, it isn't actually the case that people with autism are unable to work out what other people are thinking. But could it perhaps be the case that individuals with autism are more likely to make mistakes when trying to work this out?

We then showed that the tests that are used to measure how good people are at understanding others' minds, are biased towards 'neurotypical' people - i.e. those without autism.

This is a problem because we have shown that people are better at working out what others are thinking when they are similar to themselves. So it's not surprising that people with autism make more mistakes when working out what non-autistic individuals are thinking.

What does this mean? We need new tests that measure how good people are at understanding other people's minds, and these tests should be developed together with people with autism.