A recent study has identified eight tests that effectively measure social skills in autistic adults. Autistic individuals often struggle with understanding social cues and interpreting others’ intentions. However, evaluating training programs for social skills improvement in autistic adults has been challenging due to the lack of standardized measures.
The study administered 11 tests covering different aspects of social cognition to 103 autistic adults and 95 control participants. These tests assessed the ability to read emotions, understand social rules and cues, infer others’ thoughts and emotions, and explain social situations. The tests were evaluated based on validity and sensitivity, and eight tests were found to reliably distinguish autistic adults from controls and were considered valid.
The study also revealed that these tests were sensitive to differences in social skills and did not solely reflect intelligence. Two theory-of-mind tasks, involving watching movies and reading stories to assess character interactions, intentions, and thoughts, showed the greatest discrepancy in scores between autistic adults and controls. The researchers concluded that these tasks were particularly sensitive to differences in social skills among autistic individuals.
