Specificity of the short‐story task for autism diagnosis when controlling for depression.

Securing an accurate autism‐spectrum‐condition diagnosis, particularly among women, remains challenging for autistic adults. Building upon previous research highlighting the short‐story task (SST) as a promising tool for detecting fiction‐based mentalizing difficulties in autistic adults, this study expands its scope. We investigated the SST's discriminative capacity across three distinct groups: autistic individuals (n = 32), nonautistic individuals without mental health problems (n = 32), and nonautistic individuals with clinical depression (n = 30). All three groups differed significantly from each other in their SST mentalizing score with the nonautistic group having the highest scores, the nonautistic but depressed group having medium scores and the autistic group showing the lowest scores. Receiver operator curve (ROC) analysis reaffirmed the SST's efficacy as a discriminator. Moreover, a linear regression analysis identified the SST mentalizing score, the SST comprehension score, and the number of books read per month as significant predictors of autism‐spectrum‐condition diagnosis. These findings bolster the SST's potential as a valuable adjunct in autism diagnostics, highlighting its discriminatory ability across diverse samples. Lay Summary: Finding out if someone is autistic, especially if they are a woman, can be really difficult. A new test called the short‐story task seems to be a new promising diagnostic tool. The short‐story task looks at how well people understand the thoughts and feelings of nonautistic people within a story, and it seems to be good at telling the difference between autistic and nonautistic people. In our study, we looked at three groups of people: those who are autistic, those who are not autistic and without mental health problems, and those who are not autistic but suffer from depression. We found that the short‐story task was good at figuring out who was autistic, who was not and who had depression. We also found that how well someone did on the test, and how many books they read each month were all linked to whether they were autistic. This means that the short‐story task could be a useful tool for autism diagnostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]