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Type of Measure: Adults with Asperger Syndrome reportedly have difficulty recognizing and understanding complex emotions, which impacts their ability communicate (Golan, Baron-Cohen, & Hill, 2006). The Cambridge Mindreading (CAM) Face-Voice Battery was designed to assess the wide emotional repertoire of adults and to examine each emotion thoroughly through both visual and auditory modalities. The CAM evaluates a selection of 20 emotion concepts, taken from an emotion taxonomy (described at greater length in Baron-Cohen, Golan, Wheelwright, & Hill, 2004). The battery includes two tasks: emotion recognition in the face and emotion recognition in the voice. Each of these tasks has fifty questions, in which the participant is either watching 3–5 second silent clips of actors portraying an emotion (facial task), or listening to short sentences, spoken in a particular emotional intonation (vocal task). After watching the clip/listening to the voice recording, the participant is presented with four adjectives and is asked to choose the word that best describes how the person is feeling. There are four different scores that can be derived from the CAM: overall emotion regulation, facial emotion recognition, vocal emotion recognition, and concepts correctly recognized.

Target Population: Adults with Aspergers Syndrome

Measurement properties and previous use: Each of the 20 emotion concepts tested was expressed by 5 examples (or items). The criterion for passing a concept was correct recognition of at least 4 out of 5 items. Achieving 4 or more out of 5 would represent above chance recognition of the concept (Binomial test, p<.05). Golan, Baron-Cohen, and Hill (2006) demonstrated that participants with Aspergers Syndrome showed deficits in recognizig mental states from both faces and voices, relative to matched controls. Specifically, in twelve out of the twenty emotions and mental states tested in the CAM, a significantly lower number of participants with AS successfully recognised the concept, compared to age and IQ-matched participants.

The authors also examined ability to recognize emotions from the face and from the voice, since the CAM includes includes the same emotions in the facial and vocal scale. They tested for a group difference on the face-voice comparison (i.e. a group by modality interaction). Its power levels show it is sensitive to group differences across all scales and scores.

Lastly, Golan, Baron-Cohen, and Hill (2006) provided evidence of convergent and item validity by demonstrating that CAM scores positively correlate with the Revised “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) and with a revised version of the “Reading the Mind in the Voice” test (Golan, Baron-Cohen, Rutherford, & Hill, 2006). CAM scores were also negatively correlated with scores of the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, Clubley, 2001).

Languages: English, Español, and Svensk

Authors and Citation: Golan, O., Baron-Cohen, S., & Hill, J. (2006). The Cambridge mindreading (CAM) face-voice battery: Testing complex emotion recognition in adults with and without Asperger syndrome. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 36(2), 169-183.

Licence: This measure is freely available online, and may be used along with proper citiation.

Link to measure: Cambridge Mindreading (CAM) Face-Voice Battery (Adult)

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