Women with Turner's syndrome (TS), who lack a complete X-chromosome, show an 
impairment in remembering faces and in classifying "fear" in face images. Could 
their difficulties extend to the processing of gaze? Three tasks, all of which 
rely on the ability to make use of the eye-region of a pictured face, are 
reported. Women with TS were impaired at judging mental state from images of the 
upper face ("reading the mind in the eyes"). They were also specifically 
impaired at interpreting "fear" from displays of the eye-region of the face. 
However, they showed normal susceptibility to direction of gaze as an 
attentional cue (social cueing), since they were as sensitive as controls to the 
validity of the cue, under conditions where it should be ignored. In this task, 
unlike those of reading the upper face for intention or expression, PIQ 
accounted for a significant amount of individual variance in task performance. 
The processing of displays of the eye region affording social and affective 
information is specifically affected in TS. We speculate that amygdala 
dysfunction is likely to be implicated in this anomalous behaviour. The presence 
in the female karyotype of two complete X-chromosomes is protective for some 
socio-cognitive abilities related to the modulation of behaviour by the 
interpretation of gaze.