Levels of Self-representation and Their Sociocognitive Correlates in Late-Diagnosed Autistic Adults.
R L Moseley, C H Liu, N J Gregory and 3 others
PMID 34460052WHAT IT FOUND
Late-diagnosed autistic adults showed subtle differences in how they process self and friend information compared to non-autistic adults.
Loneliness, not just autistic traits, appeared to drive how close people felt to friends and strangers. This does not change clinical treatment yet.
Key findings
01Autistic participants were more accurate than non-autistic participants at rejecting self-mismatching and stranger-matching items, but there was no group difference in accuracy for the critical self-matching items.
02On the Personal Distance Scale, autistic participants perceived less emotional distance between a friend and a stranger than non-autistic participants did.
03Loneliness fully mediated the relationship between autistic traits and the perceived distance between friend and stranger, suggesting loneliness explains this social perception difference more than the traits themselves.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The sample was highly educated and mostly late-diagnosed, meaning results may not apply to autistic people with intellectual disabilities or those diagnosed in childhood. The non-autistic control group was small (n=44) and likely underpowered. Diagnoses were self-reported and not independently verified. The study was online, which may exclude people with lower computer literacy. The groups differed significantly in age, sex, and mental health status, which are difficult to fully control for. This is an observational study, so it cannot prove that loneliness causes these perception differences.
Declared interests
Not reported in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of a friend-bias in autistic participants as a deficit in their ability to form friendships or understand social hierarchy. The study shows a difference in how information is processed in a specific computer task, not a real-world social failure. Additionally, the mediation analysis suggests loneliness is a key factor, so addressing isolation may be more relevant to these perception differences than autism itself.