Is this "facial expression reading" test scientifically reliable?

Question

This psychological test purports to measure your ability to read facial expressions.

In the quiz, you examine a number of pictures and have to choose a word that best describes what the person was thinking/feeling at the moment this picture was taken, and it provides a numeric score.

A typical score is in the range 22-30. If you scored over 30, you are very accurate at decoding a person's facial expressions around their eyes. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult

It provides no references.

My question is whether there is any scientific basis for this test?

Answer 1

While the validity of a single test is difficult to determine without more information on how the test was constructed, the approach itself is valid and has been used in other peer reviewed studies.

Is There a "Language of the Eyes"? Evidence from Normal Adults, and Adults with Autism or Asperger Syndrome

Discussion
The results of Experiment 1 strongly support both predictions. First, normal adult subjects are able to detect a range of mental states (both basic and complex) from whole facial expressions, showing strong agreement. This replicates our earlier study which used paintings and drawings of whole faces (Baron-Cohen et al., 1996), but shows this ability under tightly controlled, standardized conditions (photographs of the same actress). Second, whilst for basic mental states the whole face provides significantly more information than either the mouth or the eyes, for complex mental states the eyes (but not the mouth) provide as much information as the full face. This may be because complex mental states are not easily expressed just by the mouth, unlike basic ones (happy, sad, etc). These results are consistent with Nummenmaa’s (1964) result, but demonstrate it for a wider set of mental states. They are also consistent with the idea that there is a language of the eyes. In Experiment 2, we tested if the eye-region effect would replicate if photos of a male face were used, in order to test the robustness of the effect.

Impaired Recognition of Social Emotions following Amygdala Damage

Recognition of Basic Emotions and Complex Mental States from the Eyes
In general, it is more difficult to recognize emotions from only a small region of the face, such as the eyes, than from the whole face. In our analysis, we controlled for this effect since correctness scores were calculated on the basis of the distribution of performances given by normal subjects to the stimuli. Figure 4 summarizes these data, in the same format previously shown for Figure 3.

Most of the peer review studies I was able to find were related to fields of neural science; however, they did use the technique of showing the area around the eyes to test for emotional recognition. However, the studies also take steps to control the images that are used by ensuring the same actor or actress and also using standard references such as "Handbook of Emotions" when preparing the images to be used for the tests.

Since the website provided doesn't actually provide information on how the images were selected and there are different actors and actresses in the pictures, the best we can say is that while the approach is valid, the test is unlikely to pass peer review.

Answer 2

As was pointed out above there is some connection to the following:
   http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/well-quiz-the-mind-behind-the-eyes/

One poster there points out that:
   "Bryant, Chicago
   My guess is this is based off the work of Paul Ekman. See his book "Emotions Revealed"."

And the following quote:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman
reveals that:
"...these photographs have been rated by large normative groups in different cultures." (referring to the original test by Elkman, on which the Well test as well as the test in discussion seem to be based)

So, all together that means that, the test is scientific in that sense that it compares your decisions with the decisions of a "large normative group". But one could argue that this is only a very limited definition of the "ability to read facial expressions" if it is one at all.