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Recent findings suggest that stigma and camouflaging contribute to mental health difficulties for autistic individuals, however, this evidence is largely based on UK samples. While studies have shown cross-cultural differences in levels of autism-related stigma, it is unclear whether camouflaging and mental health difficulties vary across cultures. Hence, the current study had two aims: (1) to determine whether significant relationships between autism acceptance, camouflaging, and mental health difficulties replicate in a cross-cultural sample of autistic adults, and (2) to compare these variables across cultures. To fulfil these aims, 306 autistic adults from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States) completed a series of online questionnaires. We found that external acceptance and personal acceptance were associated with lower levels of depression but not camouflaging or stress. Higher camouflaging was associated with elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Significant differences were found across countries in external acceptance, personal acceptance, depression, anxiety, and stress, even after controlling for relevant covariates. Levels of camouflaging also differed across countries however this effect became non-significant after controlling for the covariates. These findings have significant implications, identifying priority regions for anti-stigma interventions, and highlighting countries where greater support for mental health difficulties is needed., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

More and more studies show that neurotype mismatching (e.g. autistic-non-autistic pairing) rather than being autistic leads to interaction difficulties in autism. This study further tests this assumption by investigating communication efficiency and first impressions of verbal interactions across three dyad types (autistic, non-autistic and mixed (autistic-non-autistic) dyads). To address this aim, we used an online version of the Director Task (DT) - a task in which dyads need to organize unlexicalized images in a specific order across several turns. To do so, they need to create novel referential expressions for these images. Dyad members communicate about these images across several rounds, prompting them to negotiate shorter descriptions and therefore taking less time to complete a round. The DT thus provides objective measures of conversation outcome which can then be related to more subjective measures (ratings). Following the DT, dyads engaged in an unstructured, get-to-know-you task. Afterwards, they rated each other’s discourse abilities (coherence, fluidity & efficiency), interaction quality and likelihood to hang out. Preliminary results from fifty-two dyads (23 non-autistic dyads/16 autistic dyads/12 mixed dyads) indicate that turn duration and expression length decreased for all dyad types, suggesting that all dyads became increasingly efficient as the task proceeded. Furthermore, during the DT, perceived discourse coherence, fluidity & efficiency did not differ across dyads. However, during the get-to-know-you task, in non-autistic dyads, ratings of coherence and fluidity were higher than in autistic and mixed dyads. Finally, in mixed dyads, ratings of likelihood to hang out were lower than those in same-neurotype dyads. These results suggest that neurotype mismatching does not influence impressions of the discourse and interaction quality but does seem to influence future behavioural intentions (e.g. likelihood to hang out). This study will help us be, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In recent years, there have been increasing discussions surrounding the appropriate terminology to talk about autism. Initially, this debate revolved around the use of person-first language (e.g. person with autism) versus identity-first language (IFL; e.g. autistic person) but has recently expanded to other autism-related terms (e.g. deficits). However, to date, studies investigating autism-related language preferences have been limited to English-speaking countries, and little is known about preferences in other languages. This study addresses this gap by investigating the language preferences of French-speaking autistic adults., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished