ABSTRACT

Clinical observations suggest that girls suspected to have ASD manage to perform better in social and emotional tasks than boys, leading to a camouflage effect which results in the under-diagnosis of girls with ASD. We used the Social Attribution Task (SAT) in order to assess the performance of 12 girls who were previously diagnosed with ASD, and additionally to compare their performance in SAT to that of 12 boys who were previously diagnosed with ASD. No significant differences were found between girls and boys in all the indices of SAT except for the Person index; girls performed better than the boys in the Person index. The lack of significant differences between the boys and the girls in five out of the six SAT indices suggests that girls with ASD do not have a better social understanding than boys. They outperformed the boys only when the instructions included a clue that triggered them to name human traits, as they are instructed to do in the Person index. Implications of the usefulness of the Social Attribution Task (SAT) for diagnosing ASD in girls are discussed.

摘要

临床观察表明，怀疑患有 ASD 的女孩在社交和情感任务中比男孩表现得更好，从而导致伪装效果，导致患有 ASD 女孩的诊断不足。我们使用社会归因任务 (SAT) 来评估 12 名先前被诊断患有 ASD 的女孩的表现，另外将她们在 SAT 中的表现与 12 名先前被诊断患有 ASD 的男孩进行比较。除Person指数外，SAT其他各项指标男女生均无显着差异；在 Person 指数中，女孩的表现优于男孩。六个 SAT 指数中有五个在男孩和女孩之间没有显着差异，这表明患有 ASD 的女孩没有比男孩更好的社会理解力。只有当指示中包含一条线索，触发他们说出人类特征的线索时，他们才能胜过男孩，就像他们在人物索引中被指示做的那样。讨论了社会归因任务 (SAT) 在诊断女孩自闭症方面的有用性。