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Objective: The term ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) was first demonstrated by Premack and Woodruff (1978) and basically defined as the ability to make inferences about mental state. People’s beliefs can be different from each other and they can act according to their beliefs. Comprehension of these differences is very important for successful social interaction and communication. ToM was tested for the first time in 1978 and has been evaluated in several studies in different ways. Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) is one of the most commonly used tests for evaluating the ToM and emotion recognition skills. The theories, which has concerned women’s high social awareness and empathy rates as well as the exhibition of lower performance in areas requiring systematization and men’s high characteristics of autistic spectrum, also claim that the same situation can be valid for people who prefer science education along with social sciences. In this study, we aimed to test our hypothesis asserting that the scores of RMET is higher in students of fine art faculty than medicine and this difference may be related to gender.
Method: In our study, 38 students of the fine arts faculty and 41 students of medical school were enrolled on a voluntary basis. RMET was performed to participants (2) and scored from 0 to 32 according to correct answers. In addition, their faculties, gender, and age were evaluated. Student’s t-test and Mann-Whitney U test were used for testing hypothesis. Significance was considered as p<0.05.
Results: There were no difference between faculties as well as genders (p=0.689, p=0.416, respectively). The most obvious difference was found between male and female students (p=0.071) in the medical faculty.
Discussion: It is known that ToM could be disrupted at various levels in many psychiatric disorders especially in autistic spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. However, the effects of ToM on the quality of preferred education is poorly understood. There are various theories on this subject, and they are generally based on the evaluation of autistic spectrum features and the tests assessing ToM together. Although there are studies suggesting that the occurrence of the autistic spectrum disorders in families of engineering students was more than twice, when compared with control groups and autism in families of science students is also more than twice when compared with social science students. There are no constant and consistent results about differences of ToM skills between education disciplines. In our study, we have not shown any significant difference between two groups who are educating science and social sciences. Studies on this topic with larger samples are needed.