Take This Test to Find Out If You Have Face Blindness

If you’re having trouble recognizing people including family members, partners or friends for most or all of your life, you’re certainly not alone.

In fact, about 2% of the population suffers from prosopagnosia or face blindness, the inability to recognize faces.

Often, people with this condition cope using other strategies to recognize by remembering key points about a person such their hairstyle, fashion statement, voice, or even the way they walk.

But in some cases, these coping strategies don’t usually work bringing disabling impact on the affected person’s life.

As a result, people with prosopagnosia tend to avoid social situations for fear of being embarrassed about actual or imagined annoyance to others.

This is why researchers have come up with a short test for people with suspected prosopagnosia.

The 20-question test aims to help improve its diagnosis and provide support to people suffering from the condition.

In the test, each item is given a score out of five, giving a total score of up to 100. The final score will help identify if a person has prosopagnosia as well as its severity.

The questionnaire’s effectiveness was verified by testing it in several validation studies.

“Combining our test – termed the “20-item Prosopagnosia Index” – with others will help improve diagnosis of face blindness, helping to remove much of the uncertainty around many existing tests,” said Punit Shah, lead researcher at Medical Research Centre’s Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London.

Find out if you have face blindness by answering the questions below.

The following statements inquire about your face recognition abilities. For each item, indicate how much you agree or disagree by choosing the appropriate numbered response on a scale of one to five. One represents you strongly agree while five represents you strongly disagree.

Some people with face blindness even fail to recognize their own family members.

Read each item carefully before responding and answer as honestly as possible

1. My face recognition ability is worse than most people.
2. I have always had a bad memory for faces.
3. I find it noticeably easier to recognise people who have distinctive facial features .
4. I often mistake people I have met before for strangers .
5. When I was at school I struggled to recognise my classmates .
6. When people change their hairstyle, or wear hats, I have problems recognising them .
7. I sometimes have to warn new people I meet that I am ‘bad with faces’ .
8. I find it easy to picture individual faces in my mind .
9. I am better than most people at putting a ‘name to a face’.
10. Without hearing people’s voices I struggle to recognise them .
11. Anxiety about face recognition has led me to avoid social or professional situations .
12. I have to try harder than other people to memorise faces .
13. I am very confident in my ability to recognise myself in photographs .
14. I sometimes find movies hard to follow because of difficulties recognising characters.
15. My friends and family think I have bad face recognition or bad face memory .
16. I feel like I frequently offend people by not recognising who they are .
17. It is easy for me to recognise individuals in situations that require people to wear similar clothes (e.g. suits, uniforms, swimwear) .
18. At family gatherings I sometimes confuse individual family members .
19. I find it easy to recognise celebrities in ‘before-they-were-famous’ pictures, even if they have changed considerably.
20. It is hard to recognise familiar people when I meet them out of context (e.g. meeting a work colleague unexpectedly while shopping.

Scoring: 

For each question, other than those named below score one point 1-5 (with one being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree) Items 8, 9, 13, 17 and 19 should be reverse scored. i.e., 5 = 1; 4 = 2; 3 = 3; 2 = 4; 1 = 5 2. 

Add together the numbered responses to calculate a score between 20 (unimpaired face recognition) to 100 (severely impaired face recognition).

Source: The Daily Mail UK