Autistic children have hyper-masculinized faces

In Smart and Sexy I spent some time going over what impact testosterone has on the different ways men and women think. An excerpt of this section of the book is available from

Cambridge university autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, the cousin of comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, advances the idea that Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) including Asperger’s syndrome can be at least partially explained as being the expression of an “extreme male brain” (EMB) that results from unusually high concentrations of testosterone during fetal development.



As might be expected from an exaggerated male brain structure, autists tend to have an exaggerated male typical cognitive profile. In other words, they have a “spiky” profile on intelligence test batteries. They tend to perform much more poorly on the sub-tests that require verbal skills and language processing and have ability peaks on sub-tests which emphasize spatial reasoning.ii, iv For example, in the highly visuospatial block design task (BDT) of the Wechsler test battery, 47% of autists have a peak compared to only 2% of the general population. The peak is typically between 1-3 standard deviations above the performance you would expect based on how they did on other tests (i.e., their baseline). In addition, about 50% of neurotypical individuals perform under their baseline IQ on this task, but less than 10% of autists perform under baseline.v Perhaps coincidentally, like autists, high intelligence individuals who aren’t diagnosed with autism also tend to display intellectual profiles with specific ability peaks.


One test, Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM), has been used to measure autistic intelligence independently of verbal skill. The test is highly visual and requires very little verbal instruction. It is widely regarded as one of, if not the best, single measures of intelligence [and autists do much better on it than you would expect from more verbal tests]:


The Raven’s Progressive Matrices has been empirically demonstrated to assay the ability to infer rules, to manage a hierarchy of goals, and to form high-level abstractions. Broadly recognized as a paramount metric of reasoning and problem solving, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices is believed to be a “paradigmatic” measure of fluid intelligence, and fluid-intelligence tasks are proposed to require coordinated executive function, attentional control, and working memory. The Raven’s Progressive Matrices occupies psychometric centrality among tests of cognitive ability; in Snow, Kyllonen, and Marshalek’s (1984)vi classic diagram, which summarizes the intercorrelations among numerous tests of cognitive ability, simple, domain-specific tests lie along the periphery, and Raven’s Progressive Matrices occupies the center, as the most complex and general single test of intelligence.



As part of the extreme male brain theory of autism, Simon Baron-Cohen proposes that there exist two dimensions by which humans can interpret the way the world works. The first dimension, empathizing reasoning [female typical], involves interpreting the goals of conscious agents and general theory of mind. Empathizing reasoning allows efficient inference of mental and emotional states in others and promotes the drive to respond with appropriate emotion and physical actions to those states. It must be noted that actual “empathy” does not necessarily have to play a large role in this sort of reasoning. It could just as easily and perhaps more accurately have been called “Machiavellian” reasoning. The major thrust of this form of reasoning is understanding the emotional states of others and responding to those states well; whether this knowledge is used to sympathize with others or pursue raw self interest is secondary.


The second dimension, systemizing reasoning [male typical], is defined as the drive and ability to analyze and construct rules for a particular system that can produce consistently predictable outputs from given inputs as a result of operational rules.ix It is especially effective at interpretation of non-agentative lawful systems such as are common in the natural world. Lawful systems are characterized by being highly predictable. Given a specific input, a lawful system can be expected to repeatedly have a consistent output after some operation takes place. Examples of highly lawful systems, approaching 100% lawfulness, would be things such as mathematical formulas, the functioning of engines, and the movement of celestial bodies. Given a perturbation of such systems, the resulting change or output can be predicted with the real-world results varying minimally from predication. Moderately lawful systems, such as meteorology, are also amenable to systemizing reasoning.

Go to for the full excerpt. Or go to Amazon and get the book for way more information. If you want to see more excerpts and reviews before making a decision, then go here.

Anyway, a new study has come out which incrementally adds more support to the extreme male brain theory of autism. Software which can distinguish between male and female faces has found that both male and female children with autism have hyper-masculinized faces. Something you would very much expect if fetal testosterone is a strong contributing factor to autism:








This study has a very small sample size which is problematic. However, given what we already know about hyper-masculinization of Autists mentally, I would be very surprised if further research did not confirm this result as accurate.

Share Button

2 Replies to “Autistic children have hyper-masculinized faces”

Leave a Reply
