The strategies that autistic people use to fit into society

A recent study has aimed to delve into the barely studied phenomenon of camouflage in autistic people, that is, the strategies that people with autism use to fit into society. The idea is that a better understanding of this phenomenon can contribute to improving autism research.

The study has been carried out by a research group from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about camouflage in autism. However, research on camouflage is still fairly recent and as a result little is known about it and many unanswered questions. For this reason, with the new work an attempt has been made to obtain an integrating vision of camouflage.

Camouflage can be characterized as the set of strategies adopted by the autistic population to fit into the social world. “Our objective is to better understand this phenomenon and to analyze in depth how camouflage develops in order to offer some suggestions on how to advance in its research,” says Valentina Petrolini, a researcher in the Lindy Lab group at the UPV/EHU and co-author of the study together with Ekaine. Rodríguez-Armendariz and Agustín Vicente.

Normally, people disguise themselves with two objectives: to hide the diagnosis and to fit in socially. “We would say that a person blends in when he rehearses conversations that he is going to have, imitates the gestures and expressions of other people and, in general, when he makes an effort to hide his autistic features”, explains Valentina Petrolini. “Many studies link the attempt to pretend to be someone they are not with high levels of anxiety and long-term mental problems,” adds the UPV/EHU researcher.

Agustín Vicente, Valentina Petrolini and Ekaine Rodríguez. (Photo: Nuria González / UPV/EHU)

How is camouflage detected in the autistic population? Currently, there are tools such as tests and questionnaires, but they leave out a high proportion of people on the spectrum, such as people who camouflage themselves unconsciously, people with intellectual and/or linguistic disabilities, etc. In this paper, “we propose to triangulate information: use existing evidence, collect information from the environment, observe a person’s behavior in different contexts, and talk to people in different contexts; that is, to observe the phenomenon of camouflage without directly asking the person involved”, indicates Valentina Petrolini.

Expanding the study of camouflage to groups that are currently overlooked also has important implications in terms of impact. For this reason, this study broadens the debate on camouflage to currently little-studied groups on the autism spectrum, that is, children and adults with linguistic and/or intellectual disabilities. “We argue that camouflage in these groups may differ from what the current literature describes as typical cases of camouflage,” says Valentina Petrolini. “One of the points that emerges from our study,” continues Petrolini, “is that camouflage can present itself differently, and have a different impact, depending on the people who carry it out.”

This purely theoretical work concludes that “the basis of much of the research carried out to date is limited in terms of the characterization and representativeness of the participants, which suggests that the conclusions cannot be applied to the autistic community as a whole”, indicates Valentina Petrolini. Likewise, she emphasizes the need to study the phenomenon of autism more deeply and develop measurement tools that are more precise and inclusive than the current ones. “We could even go so far as to say that it is a call to action so as not to draw general conclusions without having a precise picture of the situation”, they point out from the Lindy Lab research group of the UPV/EHU.

The study is titled “Autistic camouflaging across the spectrum”. And it has been published in the academic journal New Ideas in Psychology. (Source: UPV/EHU)