Why Autism Evaluations Miss Masked Adults — And What Neuroaffirming Assessment Does Instead

April is Autism Acceptance Month. As more people are identified as autistic, people keep asking, “Why are so many people figuring this out in their thirties, forties—even fifties? Why does it suddenly feel like autism is everywhere?“

---

Rising diagnoses aren’t “overdiagnosis.” They reflect a more precise understanding of autism—one that finally captures people who were systematically overlooked by earlier, narrower frameworks.

The discomfort that follows isn’t really about numbers. It’s about disruption. Expanding the definition of autism challenges long-standing stereotypes, and most people’s cognitive systems prefer stable, predictable categories. When autism no longer matches the limited image people have held onto, it creates friction.

Meanwhile, people aren’t seeking evaluations casually. Most have spent years cycling through incomplete explanations: anxiety that never resolves, depression that keeps returning, OCD that doesn’t respond, medications that make things worse, even psychiatric hospitalizations that leave lasting harm.

It often comes with chronic health issues, too—typically ones that aren’t well understood—where symptoms get dismissed or minimized.

The throughline is burnout. From navigating environments that don’t fit, while carrying a constant sense of being out of sync without ever being told why.

What’s changing is not the presence of autism—it’s the lens. But that lens is still inconsistent. Who conducts the evaluation—and how current their understanding is—continues to shape who gets recognized and who remains overlooked.

One of the most important and underrecognized frameworks in psychological assessment is Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment (C/TA), developed by Stephen Finn and Constance Fischer. C/TA positions psychological assessment not as something done to a client, but as a collaborative process done with them — one that is itself therapeutic.¹

The core features of C/TA map directly onto what neuroaffirming practice requires.

Respect for clients as experts on themselves. C/TA begins by asking clients what they want to learn from the evaluation — treating them as active participants rather than passive subjects.¹ For neurodivergent individuals who have often been misread, dismissed, or pathologized in clinical settings, this stance isn’t just philosophically appealing — it’s clinically necessary.

Assessment as relational, not procedural. Finn and colleagues write that psychological assessment “is seen as an interpersonal event, and the relationship that develops between clients and assessors is recognized as paramount in making sense of what occurs.”¹ This is especially true for autistic clients, for whom the relational context of an assessment can dramatically affect performance, self-disclosure, and the validity of the data collected.

Curiosity over classification. C/TA practitioners “seek to understand rather than to judge or classify.”¹ They approach puzzling or atypical presentations with curiosity about how a person has adapted, rather than treating difference as deficit. This is the heart of a neuroaffirming stance.

Comprehensible, useful feedback. A hallmark of C/TA is the commitment to providing feedback that is meaningful, relevant, and enriching for the client — not just a report filed away in a chart. Research on C/TA has documented significant benefits including decreased symptomatology, increased self-esteem, better treatment alliance, increased hope, and improved family relationships across a wide range of client populations and presenting concerns.²³⁴

Tests as empathy magnifiers, not sorting mechanisms. Finn coined the phrase “empathy magnifiers” to describe the function of psychological tests in C/TA — tools that help clinicians better understand a client’s inner world, not devices for generating labels.⁵ This reframe is central to how I approach every evaluation.

C/TA is still not the dominant paradigm in U.S. psychological assessment.¹ The prevailing model remains evaluator-led, data-extraction-focused, and largely indifferent to the relational context of the assessment. For a general population, that approach has real limitations. For neurodivergent individuals, those limitations are often the difference between an accurate and an inaccurate result.

Assessment is an interpersonal event. Who’s in the room, and how they’re relating to each other, shapes the data. That’s not soft science — that’s methodology.

Here’s what nobody says plainly enough: the more “objective” the measure, the more it rewards masking. And the more it rewards masking, the more it punishes the people who most need to be found.

Performance-based measures feel rigorous because they’re normed and quantifiable. But they’re designed to observe what’s visible. The ADOS-2 asks evaluators to rate what they see during a structured interaction. Affect. Eye contact. Reciprocity. Social fluency.

For someone who has spent years learning to perform neurotypicality, that interaction is exactly where their masking is most practiced and most convincing.⁶

The evaluator sees adequate eye contact. Good verbal fluency. Appropriate affect. They score accordingly. The report comes back: no autism identified. I’ve reviewed these reports. Honestly, they’re wild — because the autism is so clearly there.

The problem is the data. Performance-based measures simply don’t capture it.⁷

And the person goes home and falls apart. Because those 45 minutes were the most exhausting of their week. Nobody measured that cost. That cost is the data.

This is one of the most common reasons autistic adults go undiagnosed for years: they test well. Autism gets missed simply because someone makes eye contact or has friends — as if either of those things is diagnostic.

Research consistently shows that autism in women, girls, and people of color is routinely missed at every level of the diagnostic system — often for years, sometimes for decades.⁸⁹ The methodology of standardized testing is a significant reason why.

Performance-based measures — standardized cognitive, behavioral, or symptom tasks administered under controlled conditions — carry specific assumptions that are worth being transparent about.

Performance-based measures tend to assume:

• that optimal performance reflects typical functioning
• that the assessment context is neutral for all test-takers
• that consistent, effortful task engagement is accessible on demand
• that the gap between performance and daily functioning is either negligible or clinically interpretable

For many neurodivergent people, none of those assumptions hold reliably.

The performance paradox. A significant percentage of autistic adults — particularly those who masked heavily for years — will perform within normative ranges on structured cognitive tasks in a clinical office, then return home and struggle to function at anything close to that level. The assessment context itself, with its clearly defined rules, one-to-one attention, and limited ambiguity, is often the exact set of conditions under which an autistic person performs best. The data is accurate. It’s just not representative.¹⁰⁷

Demand avoidance profiles and PDA. For individuals with a Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) profile, performance-based tasks with explicit evaluation frames can trigger exactly the kind of avoidance response that makes the resulting data clinically misleading. This isn’t noncompliance or lack of effort — it’s a documented neurological response to perceived demands. An evaluation approach that doesn’t account for PDA profiles will systematically mischaracterize this population.¹¹¹²

Sensory and cognitive load effects. Assessments are cognitively expensive for many neurodivergent individuals. Sensory environments, novel social dynamics, masking effort, and the executive function demands of the testing situation itself consume resources that won’t show up in the task data. A performance-based measure captures what someone did under those conditions — it doesn’t capture what it cost them to do it.¹³⁶

The question I’m asking isn’t just “can this person do X under ideal conditions?” It’s “what does this person’s actual daily experience look like, and what does the evidence tell us about why?”

The ADOS-2 asks: what does this person’s social behavior look like to me?

The MIGDAS-2¹⁴ asks something entirely different. What does it take to get through an ordinary day? Where does the energy go?

We’re not assessing whether someone can perform social fluency in a controlled setting. We’re assessing how much energy it costs autistic people to go about their lives.

Those are fundamentally different questions. They produce fundamentally different data.

Highly masked autism doesn’t look like the presentations that shaped the diagnostic criteria. It looks like someone who is very good at looking fine. The person who memorized social scripts so thoroughly they no longer notice they’re running them. The adult who’s been called “too smart” to be autistic by every clinician they’ve seen — which is often, because they’ve been seeking answers for a long time.⁸

You don’t find this by observing surface behavior. You find it by digging. Asking the right questions about internal experience, sensory life, and the lifelong history of exhaustion and not-quite-fitting that nobody ever had language for.

And here’s something worth naming directly: you don’t need an extensive test battery to diagnose autism accurately. That’s a myth. What produces an accurate diagnosis isn’t the volume of tests — it’s the quality of the clinical reasoning behind them. I’m always running differentials. In every evaluation, every therapy session, from the first intake conversation. What fits this picture? What doesn’t? What would change if this were something else entirely?

This is rigorous assessment.

Anchoring evaluations in structured clinical interviews, validated self-report measures, developmental history, collateral information, and observational data isn’t a workaround for rigor. It’s a more comprehensive methodology for the population I serve.

MIGDAS-2 (Monteiro Interview Guidelines for Diagnosing Autism Spectrum). The MIGDAS-2 is a conversation-based diagnostic interview designed specifically to be neuroaffirming in its format. It doesn’t ask the evaluator to observe deficits — it creates conditions for the person to communicate authentically and then interprets that communication through a neurodivergent-informed lens. It’s validated, structured, and designed to reduce the confounds that make performance-based assessment unreliable for autistic individuals.¹⁴ I’m trained in MIGDAS-2 administration and interpretation.

DIVA-5 (Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults). The DIVA-5 is a structured clinical interview for adult ADHD that takes developmental history seriously.¹⁵ It accounts for the fact that many adults — particularly women and late-diagnosed individuals — learned to compensate, mask, or externalize their ADHD in ways that make symptom recall unreliable without the right framework. It’s thorough, evidence-based, and sensitive to presentation variability.

Comprehensive intake and developmental history. A neuroaffirming evaluation requires enough history to contextualize current presentation. This means understanding education experiences, medical history, prior mental health contacts, family history, sensory profile, social communication history, and the arc of how presenting concerns developed over time. Skipping this in favor of faster task-based measures is what actually loses diagnostic precision.¹⁶

Validated self-report and collateral instruments. Standardized rating scales and structured self-report measures add quantitative anchors to the clinical picture. The difference is that I treat these as one data source among several, not as the primary diagnostic mechanism. Self-report is imperfect for this population — both underreporting and overreporting are common and have specific clinical meaning — and the evaluation methodology needs to account for that.¹⁰

Most people walk into an evaluation having already pre-filtered their experience.

They’ve learned to hedge. To soften. To explain away the things that feel most true to them — because those are exactly the things that have been dismissed before. The raw data has already been edited before the first question is asked.

When someone doesn’t feel crazy or weird in the room, they tell me more. And when they tell me more, I get a more accurate picture. The relational quality of the evaluation isn’t separate from the clinical quality. It’s what determines it.

A neuroaffirming evaluation changes what’s possible to say out loud. When the relational context communicates I already know what this is, I’m not going to pathologize it, and you’re not strange for experiencing it this way — people stop translating. They say the thing they’ve never said in a clinical setting because they never felt safe enough to.

That’s the data. That’s what I need to determine whether the client sitting across from me meets DSM-5-TR criteria for autism.

I’m a late-diagnosed AuDHD clinician. I know what it costs to look fine.⁶ I’ve spent years moving through systems that weren’t designed to see me. When I tell someone that, the translation work stops. We’re already speaking the same language.

My years of misdiagnosis aren’t a soft humanizing detail. They’re directly relevant to my ability to recognize what gets missed — and to create the kind of room where someone finally feels safe enough to stop performing.

It’s worth saying plainly: the letters after a provider’s name don’t tell you whether they’re trained to assess masked autism. They tell you their licensure category. Those are different things.

This plays out across credential types in different ways.

General medical providers — pediatricians, PCPs, psychiatrists — typically receive limited training in neurodevelopmental assessment. Their screeners are population-level tools designed to flag significant developmental divergence in young children, particularly those who are nonverbal or have substantial early delays. They do that job reasonably well. That is a different job from identifying autism in a verbal, socially compensated adult or teenager who has spent years learning how to look fine. If a provider told you your child couldn’t be autistic because they make eye contact, have friends, or are doing well in school — that’s a screener with a very narrow field of vision, not a diagnostic ruling.

Psychiatric nurse practitioners occupy a similar position. Some are thoughtful, thorough diagnosticians who take real time with complex presentations. Others — and this is a pattern many people have experienced firsthand — will administer a brief checklist, spend 20–30 minutes in session, and come away with a diagnosis or a ruling-out that was never going to capture what’s actually there. That’s not an indictment of the credential. It’s a description of what happens when a complex neurodevelopmental presentation gets assessed with tools built for something else, in an appointment window that doesn’t allow for the depth this work requires.

But here’s the part that comes up less often: the same limitation applies to many psychologists. A PhD or PsyD is a research and clinical training credential. It is not, by itself, a neurodevelopmental assessment credential. Most doctoral psychology programs produce excellent generalist clinicians. They don’t necessarily produce clinicians who have gone deep on masked autism presentation, late-identified adults, PDA profiles, or the gender and racial disparities in who gets missed.⁸¹⁷¹⁸

I receive referrals from psychologists regularly — because a good clinician knows what falls outside their specialty and refers accordingly. That’s exactly the right call. But it also means the assumption that “psychologist” automatically signals more qualified for this specific work doesn’t hold. Some psychologists are deeply specialized in neurodevelopmental assessment. Others aren’t, and they know it.

The question to ask any evaluator — regardless of their letters — is the same: what specific training do you have in neurodivergent assessment? What tools do you use, and why? How do you approach presentations that have been masking for decades? A clinician with genuine expertise in this area will have clear, specific answers. Credential category won’t tell you that. The answers will.

There’s a persistent assumption that credential category maps onto competence for a specific kind of work. That a psychologist is more qualified than a social worker to assess autism. That a physician’s opinion carries more diagnostic weight. That the letters after someone’s name tell you whether they’ll find what you came in looking for.

They don’t. Credential category tells you about training breadth and licensure scope. It tells you almost nothing about depth of specialty training in neurodivergent assessment.

This matters because I hear a version of the same story regularly: someone saw a psychologist — sometimes several — and was told they weren’t autistic, or were given a diagnosis that didn’t fit, or left with a report that described their surface behavior without ever touching their actual experience. Not because those clinicians were bad clinicians. Because neurodevelopmental assessment for masked presentations is a specialty, and not every doctoral-level clinician has trained in it. A psychologist who specializes in depression treatment, trauma, or general cognitive testing is not automatically equipped to assess a highly masked autistic adult. They may be extraordinary at what they do. This just isn’t their thing.

The bar for rigorous neurodevelopmental assessment isn’t a credential category. It’s: validated tools designed for the presentation being assessed, administered by a clinician with deep specialized training, within a methodology that accounts for masking, demand profiles, and the full complexity of co-occurring conditions.

By that standard, an LCSW-C with autism as a genuine specialty — formal training in MIGDAS-2 and DIVA-5 administration, years of accumulated clinical knowledge about how autism actually presents across gender, across age, across a lifetime of compensation — can be more qualified for this specific work than a doctoral-level clinician whose training didn’t go there. Lived experience as a late-diagnosed AuDHD person isn’t separate from that clinical expertise. It’s part of what makes the assessment work. Autism has been my clinical focus and, frankly, my special interest for years. I’ve gone deep in ways that formal training alone doesn’t produce.

I’m part of The Divergent Clinician, a community of neurodivergent psychologists and master’s-level clinicians dedicated to refining our approaches to complex presentations. I hold PDA Level 2 Certification through PDA North America. I’m completing my Certified Eating Disorder Specialist (CEDS) and Inclusive Eating Disorder Specialist (IEDS) credentials, and I’ve trained extensively in evidence-based treatment for OCD and related disorders like BFRBs.

This breadth matters because neurodivergent individuals are substantially more likely to present with co-occurring OCD, eating disorders, and BFRBs.¹⁹²⁰ An evaluator who only understands one part of that picture won’t accurately assess the rest. That’s true regardless of what kind of clinician they are.

Whether you come to Side Quest or go elsewhere, here’s what actually signals a quality autism evaluation.

Do they have lived experience? An autistic evaluator is more likely to build rapport quickly and get the data they need to create an accurate profile. They are more likely to understand the nuances of masking, compensation, and co-occurring conditions.

Do they use tools designed for masked presentations? The MIGDAS-2, CAT-Q, CATI, and similar measures are built to capture autism as it actually presents in adults — including people who have spent years compensating. The ADOS-2 alone is not sufficient for masked presentations.

Do they have specialized training in autism — not just general clinical training? There’s a meaningful difference between a clinician who has completed general licensure and one who has invested specifically in neurodivergent assessment. Ask about their training. A good evaluator will be able to tell you exactly what tools they use and why.

Do they account for PDA profiles and demand sensitivity? Pathological Demand Avoidance is still widely unrecognized.¹² If a clinician has never heard of it, or dismisses it, that tells you something important about how they’ll assess you.

Do they understand co-occurring conditions? Autism rarely shows up alone. OCD, ADHD, eating disorders, BFRBs, anxiety — these overlap significantly with autistic presentations, and a clinician who only knows one piece of the picture will miss the rest.

Are they curious or classifying? A good evaluator is genuinely curious about how you’ve adapted and survived, not just checking boxes. If the process feels like you’re being observed for deficits rather than understood as a whole person — that’s information.

Will they tell you if something else is going on? Ethical assessment means following the clinical picture wherever it leads. If an evaluator only ever confirms what clients came in expecting to find, ask more questions. A good evaluator refers out when something falls outside their scope. That’s not a limitation — that’s the protocol of rigorous assessment.

Side Quest Psychotherapy offers neuroaffirming autism and ADHD evaluations via telehealth in Maryland, Virginia, and Florida. Both the CDA and FDI are available for adolescents and adults statewide.

Comprehensive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA)
Our most thorough evaluation, combining MIGDAS-2 with a dozen measure battery spanning autistic traits, masking and camouflaging, demand sensitivity, autistic burnout, sensory processing, and interoception—domains most evaluations never touch. Includes developmental history and optional collateral input from friends and family. Built to answer one key question: has this person been masking their whole life?

Focused Diagnostic Interview (FDI)
MIGDAS-2 plus targeted measures, without the full sensory workup. Designed for people who have done self-reflection and want clinical confirmation and documentation. Think of it as a psychiatric evaluation—but tailored for masked presentations, with the time and methodology to do it properly.

Both produce a formal diagnostic report. The CDA is more extensive, while the FDI is shorter but still clearly explains whether you do or do not meet the DSM-5-TR diagnostic criteria. Both are available for adolescents and adults.

	Neuropsychological testing	Neuroaffirming Comprehensive Diagnostic Assessment (“CDA” at Side Quest)	Neuroaffirming Focused Diagnostic Interview (“FDI” at Side Quest)	Psychiatrist / PMHNP	PCP / pediatrician
Who provides it	Neuropsychologist (PhD/PsyD)	Side Quest Psychotherapy	Side Quest Psychotherapy	MD (psychiatrist), PMHNP	MD, DO, pediatrician
Primary tools	ADOS-2 or MIGDAS-2, cognitive batteries, performance-based measures	MIGDAS-2 + 12-measure battery spanning autistic traits, masking & camouflaging, demand sensitivity, burnout, sensory processing & interoception + developmental history + collateral (optional)	MIGDAS-2 + targeted measures	DSM-5 diagnostic criteria, clinical interview, symptom review	M-CHAT, developmental checklist, clinical impression
Best for	People who need to see objective data to start believing their own experience	Complex or highly masked presentations; full sensory profile needed; burnout & chronic health overlap	Self-aware adults needing clinical confirmation + documentation; often more thorough than a psychiatric evaluation	Medication management; criteria-based diagnostic confirmation; brief diagnostic appointments	Early developmental flagging in very young, nonverbal children
Catches masked autism	▲ Depends heavily on evaluator	✓ Built for this	✓ Built for this	▲ Depends on training & time	✗ Not reliably
Sensory profile included	▲ Sometimes	✓ Yes	✗ No	✗ Rarely	✗ No
Developmental history	✓ Yes	✓ Comprehensive	▲ Targeted	▲ Limited — time-constrained	▲ Limited
Evaluator bias risk	✗ High — eye contact & social fluency scored	✓ Minimized by methodology	✓ Minimized by methodology	▲ Moderate — criteria-based but evaluator-dependent	✗ Very high
PDA-informed	✗ Rarely	✓ Yes	✓ Yes	✗ Rarely	✗ No
Produces formal diagnosis	✓ Yes	✓ Yes	✓ Yes	✓ Yes	▲ Sometimes — often inappropriate

Neuropsychological testing

Who provides it

Neuropsychologist (PhD/PsyD)

Primary tools

ADOS-2 or MIGDAS-2, cognitive batteries, performance-based measures

Best for

People who need to see objective data to start believing their own experience

Catches masked autism

▲ Depends heavily on evaluator

Sensory profile

▲ Sometimes

Dev. history

✓ Yes

Evaluator bias

✗ High — eye contact & social fluency scored

PDA-informed

✗ Rarely

Formal diagnosis

✓ Yes

Neuroaffirming Comprehensive Diagnostic Assessment (“CDA” at Side Quest)

Who provides it

Side Quest Psychotherapy

Primary tools

MIGDAS-2 + 12-measure battery: autistic traits, masking & camouflaging, demand sensitivity, burnout, sensory processing & interoception + developmental history + optional collateral

Best for

Complex or highly masked presentations; full sensory profile needed; burnout & chronic health overlap

Catches masked autism

✓ Built for this

Sensory profile

✓ Yes

Dev. history

✓ Comprehensive

Evaluator bias

✓ Minimized by methodology

PDA-informed

✓ Yes

Formal diagnosis

✓ Yes

Neuroaffirming Focused Diagnostic Interview (“FDI” at Side Quest)

Who provides it

Side Quest Psychotherapy

Primary tools

MIGDAS-2 + targeted measures

Best for

Self-aware adults needing clinical confirmation + documentation; often more thorough than a psychiatric evaluation

Catches masked autism

✓ Built for this

Sensory profile

✗ No

Dev. history

▲ Targeted

Evaluator bias

✓ Minimized by methodology

PDA-informed

✓ Yes

Formal diagnosis

✓ Yes

Psychiatrist / PMHNP

Who provides it

MD (psychiatrist), PMHNP

Primary tools

DSM-5 diagnostic criteria, clinical interview, symptom review

Best for

Medication management; criteria-based diagnostic confirmation; brief diagnostic appointments

Catches masked autism

▲ Depends on training & time

Sensory profile

✗ Rarely

Dev. history

▲ Limited — time-constrained

Evaluator bias

▲ Moderate — criteria-based but evaluator-dependent

PDA-informed

✗ Rarely

Formal diagnosis

✓ Yes

PCP / pediatrician

Who provides it

MD, DO, pediatrician

Primary tools

M-CHAT, developmental checklist, clinical impression

Best for

Early developmental flagging in very young, nonverbal children

Catches masked autism

✗ Not reliably

Sensory profile

✗ No

Dev. history

▲ Limited

Evaluator bias

✗ Very high

PDA-informed

✗ No

Formal diagnosis

▲ Sometimes — often inappropriate

✓ Yes ▲ Partial / varies ✗ No / not reliably CDA   FDI = neuroaffirming services at Side Quest

The CDA and FDI are the names used at Side Quest Psychotherapy for our neuroaffirming evaluation services.

For some people, neuropsychological testing is still the right first step. Not because it’s more accurate for masked presentations. Because internalized ableism is real. Some people need to see numbers before they can trust their own experience. If that’s where you are, I’d rather send you to a neuropsychologist than push you toward a methodology your brain isn’t ready to believe yet. Just choose your evaluator carefully. A lot of them are still scoring eye contact.What happens when you pursue a neuroaffirming assessment.

A lot of healing happens in these evaluations. Not because I’m doing therapy — these are diagnostic processes. But being assessed by someone who is actually looking for what’s there, and finding it, is often the first time a clinical encounter has reflected someone’s experience back accurately.

I’ve watched adults shift when the pieces finally come together. Not because I told them something they didn’t know. Because they finally had language for it. Language they could use with their doctor, their employer, their family, themselves.

And then there are the parents.

Some of the most significant moments in this work happen during collateral interviews. Walking a parent through their kid’s early years. Watching them start to cry. Not because anything is wrong. Because for the first time, someone is asking the questions that make their child’s whole life make sense. Sometimes they realize mid-conversation that they’re describing themselves too.

That happens more than you’d think.

The evaluation produces a report. But what it’s really doing is giving people a more accurate story about themselves. For people who’ve spent years with the wrong story, or no story at all — that is not a small thing.

Yes — in Maryland, Virginia, and Florida, a licensed clinical social worker with specialized training in neurodevelopmental assessment can provide an autism diagnosis. Licensure category doesn’t determine diagnostic accuracy; specialized training and validated tools do.

No. Neuropsychological testing — including cognitive and IQ batteries — is not required for an autism diagnosis and is not included in DSM-5-TR criteria. For many masked adults, interview-based and self-report tools like the MIGDAS-2 produce more accurate results than performance-based measures.

Yes. Telehealth autism evaluations using interview-based tools like the MIGDAS-2 are clinically valid, particularly for adults. The relational and conversational format of the MIGDAS-2 is well-suited to remote administration.

The Comprehensive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) includes a full 12-measure battery covering autistic traits, masking, demand sensitivity, burnout, sensory processing, and interoception. The Focused Diagnostic Interview (FDI) uses the MIGDAS-2 with targeted measures, without the full sensory workup — comparable in depth to a psychiatric evaluation but designed specifically for masked presentations. Both produce a formal diagnostic report.

A neuroaffirming evaluation uses tools designed to find autism as it actually presents — including in people who mask heavily — rather than tools that observe surface behavior. It accounts for masking, demand sensitivity, sensory profile, and developmental history, rather than scoring eye contact and social fluency in a structured interaction.

If you’re ready to find out what’s actually there, I’d love to work with you.

👉 Book a Free 15-Minute Consultation

References:

1. Finn et al., 2012. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
2. Finn & Tonsager, 1992. [↩]
3. Tharinger et al., 2009. [↩]
4. Hilsenroth et al., 2004. [↩]
5. Finn, 2007. [↩]
6. Hull et al., 2017. [↩] [↩] [↩]
7. Livingston & Happé, 2017. [↩] [↩]
8. Bargiela et al., 2016. [↩] [↩] [↩]
9. Sturrock et al., 2022. [↩]
10. Lai et al., 2017. [↩] [↩]
11. Egan et al., 2023. [↩]
12. O’Nions et al., 2014. [↩] [↩]
13. Cage et al., 2018. [↩]
14. Monteiro, 2010. [↩] [↩]
15. Kooij & Francken, 2010. [↩]
16. Lai et al., 2014. [↩]
17. Dworzynski et al., 2012. [↩]
18. Lovelace et al., 2024. [↩]
19. Meier et al., 2015. [↩]
20. Westwood & Tchanturia, 2017. [↩]