The Aspie Quiz was recently updated to Final Version 3, which is a major update, so I thought it would be a good idea to retake it. Much of what’s changed is behind the scenes refinement of the test items and won’t be evident to the average test taker. If you’re new to the Aspie Quiz, you might want to read my original write up for more background. This post will focus primarily on what’s new.
If you’ve taken the Aspie Quiz before, you’ll likely notice that there are some new questions and that the wording of the test result has changed. Previously, test takers received Neurotypical and Aspie scores; currently the scores are presented as Neurotypical and Neurodiverse, with an outcome of “likely neurotypical”, “likely neurodiverse” or a mix of the two.
In the context of the test, the term neurodiverse includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dyspraxia (and perhaps OCD and Tourettes). However, the test still appears to be primarily a test for autistic traits. This is reflected in the statement that:
The goal of this test is to check for neurodiverse / neurotypical traits in adults. The neurodiversity classification can be used to give a reliable indication of autism spectrum traits prior to eventual diagnosis.
If you want to read more in detail about the development of the Aspie Quiz and what has changed over time, Leif Ekblad has published a paper detailing his research and a detailed history of the quiz. Of particular interest is the comparison of the AQ and Aspie Quiz scores, particularly for women. As many of us who’ve taken both have noticed, the AQ has a strong gender bias and the Aspie Quiz is more gender neutral. Anecdotally, the Aspie Quiz has always appeared to be a better predictor of whether someone is on the spectrum and that is addressed in the paper as well.
There are some aspects of the paper that I found problematic, but I’ll leave that to others to critique and focus here on the test itself. Before I do that, however, there is one sentence in the paper that jumped out at me that I want to share:
The idea that neurodiversity/autistic traits lie on the extreme end of a normal distribution is not supported by Aspie Quiz, rather the neurodiversity traits seem to have its own normal distribution overlapping the normal distribution of typical traits.
For those who have wondered why they receive two scores on this test, I think the above quote sums it up nicely. It’s also a good response to the oft-repeated fallacy that “everyone is on the spectrum” or “everyone is a little autistic.”
Taking the Test
To take the Aspie Quiz, start here. You have the choice to login/register or to proceed directly to the test. If you choose the former, you’ll be contributing to the test developer’s research regarding the stability of test scores over time (assuming you take the test more than once).
Once you’ve proceeded to the start of the test, you’ll first be asked some demographic questions. The information you share is used in the development of the test and has no impact on your scoring.
The test itself is 128 questions, answered on a Likert scale. The choices are: don’t know, no/never, a little, yes/often. The test will take about 20 minutes, so be sure you have enough time to finish it before starting.
Scoring the Test
At the end of the test, you’ll get neurodiverse and neurotypical scores, along with a “likely” prediction. Here are mine:
- Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 156 of 200
- Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 54 of 200
- You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)
You’ll also get a nice spider web graphic and the option to download a PDF with more details, which I highly recommend doing. The PDF contains detailed information about which questions count toward which aspect of your score and includes some background information that may be helpful in interpreting your scores in each category.
On the previous version of the test, I scored:
- Your Aspie score: 170 of 200
- Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 32 of 200
- You are very likely an Aspie
Since the last time I took the quiz, there are quite a few new questions and in particular a batch of new questions about sexuality and relationships. Given that I scored so high in Neurotypical attachment (i.e. sexuality) and relatively low in the social and contact on the neurodiverse side, I suspect the relationship and sexuality questions are the biggest factors in shifting my scores toward neurotypical.
Some of the questions in those areas were hard to answer accurately because they’re worded as if the test taker is seeking a romantic relationship or interested in dating, an assumption that doesn’t apply to either those in a monogamous relationship or those who are aromantic or asexual.
Although the quiz avoids gender bias, a few of the questions are biased in the direction of heterosexuality or presumption of asexuality as a non-neurotypical “preference”. More careful wording of some of the new relationship/sexuality questions to encompass both LGBTQ test takers and those in monogamous relationships would help mitigate some of this problem.
But I also think that the role of romantic and sexual preferences in the test outcome would benefit from a different approach. It’s stereotypical and ableist to assume that neurotypical people are sexual and neurodiverse people are not. The neurodiverse people that I know are distributed over a wide spectrum of sexuality and sexual preferences, from asexual to hypersexual and everything in between, just like the neurotypical people that I know.
Looking at the Attachment category questions in the PDF, all of the Neurotypical Attachment traits are related to sex. The Neurodiverse Attachment traits, on the other hand, are questionable in their relevance to attachment versus things like language pragmatics and learning social skills through rules. Surely neurotypical people are interested in aspects of attachment other than sex. More importantly, it’s disappointing to see a test of neurodiversity ascribing typical autistic social traits to “attachment disorder.”
Overall the new questions are much like those of the earlier version that I took: a mix of the highly relatable with the expected, plus a few that I have trouble tying back to any known autistic traits.
I was amused by “Do you have a need to confess?” because I’m so bad at lying or concealing things from people and inevitably feel the need to spill my guts at the drop of a hat. There were a few perplexing ones, including the one about walking behind people and the one about examining people’s hair. (And I still don’t get the slowly flowing water question – though I suspect it identifies people who are visual stimmers in general.) I wasn’t sure how to interpret the “afraid in safe situations” question. Maybe it’s meant to reveal phobias or irrational anxiety?
Finally, the “criticism, correction, direction” question is repeated twice with slightly different wording (possibly as a check question).
The Bottom Line
Of all the online tests I’ve evaluated, the Aspie Quiz has always felt like the most accurate in overall scoring and the most comprehensive in variety of questions and that’s still the case. I’ll be curious to see how re-takers feel about their scores and what direction, if any, scores have shifted in.
Musings of an Aspie 
For once early with a comment, haha. When using a touchpad tt might be good to check if the dot actually jumped to the intended position. My eagerness to do the new version combined with my clumsiness cooperated in a mean way: the detailed results showed six items where I know that I had intended another input but came up with the default ‘don’t know’. Mostly my fault of course but still. Even so, pretty neurodiverse :).
I’ve noticed that on other tests as well. I’m writing a new version of the RAADS and was initially puzzled by the low score I got when taking it on my phone. 🙂 Turns out it wasn’t registering the touchscreen input consistently.
I wanna be an athlete!
I scored 157/200 Neurodiverse, 49/200 Neurotypical on this one. My previous score on the older version of the test was 172/200; 20/200, which is a shift in the same direction as yours. I suspect that the shift in emphasis from the autistic spectrum to include other neurodiverse conditions has reduced the score for those who do not have OCD, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. I have some concerns about whether the changes to this test are of practical use, given that there is little overlap between the traits of many of the various neurodiverse diagnoses.
I agree about the changes. I think moving away from the “hunting” category lends it more legitimacy but the test actually retained most of those questions (which seemed to be rooted in autistic traits anyhow but for different reasons than the author included them) and did away with some others.
I have a lot of OCD traits and have become increasingly dyslexic, but still saw my score shift so I went looking for something else to blame, but you’re right a similar shift could definitely have different underlying reasons for different people.
I don’t remember what I scored before, but this time it was 158/200 and 75/200, very likely diverse. The sex questions were puzzling at times, especially the “alternative view of what’s attractive in the opposite sex” question. I would have liked something about what he was considering a norm or baseline. I like the web results as far as getting a global sense of the results but for me, it was tricky to translate the text of the specific results to the spikes and troughs in the web.
I went back to look but you didn’t post your score last time. 🙂
I agree about some of the questions being hard to interpret. There’s such a broad range of what people find attractive that I don’t think it’s possible to identify a true norm.
There’s a PDF you can download that explains what the various spikes and troughs mean, though some of it feels problematic in how it’s interpreted.
Mine went from 172/200 and 36/200 to now 185/200 and 27/200. Maybe that’s because my brain is still changing since it’s only been a year since I got off the zombie meds and I’m still healing and “discovering” new (to me) traits. Sigh… It’s not diagnostic, but I’m using it as a monitor by taking it every 5 months or so. Part of my continuing research.
The first couple of times that I took the online quizzes my scores went up on each and I think what you say about discovering and becoming more aware of certain traits is a big part of the increase.
Taking it over time is a great idea and also contributes to the author’s research, which is a bonus for the community.
The last one I was very much on the spectrum (159/200 neuro diverse). This one I answered “too many of the control questions inconsistently.” Talk about frustrating! What are the control questions? And why does there have to be a right answer on them in order to get a result? Maybe I’m in no man’s land?
Well that’s frustrating.
Here is the information from the academic paper explaining the function of the control items:
“Five pairs of control items were added early in the validation phase. These items were designed such that one of the items in the pair would normally be answered positively by Aspies while the other would normally be answered positively by neurotypicals. When somebody answered both items with “yes” or “no,” this was considered as a control item inconsistency. Participants were allowed to answer no more than one item inconsistently. This arrangement made it impossible to receive high or low scores just by checking “yes” or “no” on all items.”
So you must have answered at least 2 pairs of the control items with yes or no answers on both, which is considered statistically unlikely. Basically they’re a guard against someone randomly checking boxes and getting a valid result, but if you had difficulty interpreting the questions or weren’t sure about an answer, it’s possible that you unwittingly picked the “wrong” answer. For example, before I read much about Asperger’s, I assumed that I didn’t have super sensitive hearing. Now that I’ve actually tested that out against what other people can hear in certain situations, I know that I do. So that presents a question where I might have answered “no” at one point in time and if that was a control question, I might “fail” to meet the control criteria because of that answer combined with a similarly negative (and correct) answer to the neurotypical control pair question.
Thanks! I think I’ll try it again on my iPad later when I have real wifi, not on my phone. I’m still learning what is “normal” and what isn’t and how it applies to me. Perhaps the wording is a bit confusing? When I don’t have a base line, how am I supposed if I’m normal or if I’m “weird”?
Got it this time! 167/200 on the aspie side, so higher than the last one. Not sure what exactly I answered differently, though.
Thank you for sharing your score. It’s interesting to see how the scores change for each of us. And I totally agree with the confusion on where the baseline is. I always feel like I want to qualify my answers with a few paragraphs of text explanation on these quizzes. 🙂
Hmmmm my previous results were stored on my old computer:( But I think I recall getting exactly 185 out of 200 for Nuerodiverse too. So I think it was the same. and 19 out of 200 for Nuerotypical. I agree with you on the questions but what I do and did in the past too was pretend I was single and answer accordingly to how I would act single in some of the sexual questions…or pretend I was not monogamous or go with how my brain would view those situations in other people…Am I more likely to think it’s ok for a couple to have more than one partner if it seriously does not bother either of them? Maybe sometimes but its NOT for me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think outside the box a little bit more than a nuerotypical would on that question perhaps? So I think I answered sometimes to that even though I would normally not love that idea or def not be ok with it in my marriage or in others who are not ok with it either…so I kind of did that with some of those trickier answers…
As for people walking behind…it REALLY makes me nervous! So I get that one…
Also for me “Afraid in Safe situations” Applies to how I feel when i get sensory overload in a restaurant or a movie theatre…my anxiety goes up and I DO feel afraid…but its more of a sensory thing but for those who would not know that taking the test, they would answer YES…I know now its sensory based but I still answer yes because…technically I am afraid sometimes in safe situations:)
Oh and also, those questions about examining hair and water were very visual stemming questions because i am EXTREMELY visual and I do that…( water to a lesser degree) but I DO have those tendencies and I DO notice every detail of a persons hair, make up and body type…not out of judgement but out of pure observation and data.
Oh my gosh, here’s an example of how literal my receptive language has become. I took “examine the hair of” as literally physically examining someone’s hair (and then seriously thought of monkeys grooming each other! LOL http://lucygoes.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/img_6986.jpg). So yes, examine as in look at a lot I can see as a kind of visual stimming. Silly me.
I think the romance-based questions could easily be reworded as general relationship questions to encompass platonic relationships, romantic relationships, and make it easier for a whole range of people to answer. For example, instead of “Do you realize hours later that somebody that you have a romantic interest for actually showed interest for you, and then feel bad about the missed opportunity to connect?” the question could be “Do you realize hours later that somebody that you are interested in having a relationship with expressed interest in connecting with you, and then feel bad about the missed opportunity to connect?” That happens with friendships as well as with romantic overtures, especially for those of us who are super oblivious to social cues. 😀
The afraid in safe situations is really interesting to me because I think what is safe for the average person isn’t necessarily safe for an autistic person. The examples you gave of public places is one where a typically safe place like a movie theater could be safe for most people but unsafe for someone who is epileptic or has sound/visual sensitivities. I think this could actually tie back to how society tends to normalize anxiety according to neurotypical standards and then get slapped with the anxiety disorder label when our anxiety is actually related to real threats.
And I feel like I’m coming across as really really cranky so I’ll stop now.
Yes! Good thoughts! I totally agree…this is what I argue with doctors over…when they saw I have unexplainable anxiety I EXPLAIN my sensory overload and show how logical it is but because it is not considered “normal” they put it on my chart as “unreasonable phobias” whatever…so not true…now I don’t tell them ( but I did when I was a teen and didn’t know any better or that I was an aspie so that is forever on my medic chart and I get treated accordingly) It makes me cranky! And I agree with your wording…I pretended that in my head too because its not romantic but I do feel bad if someone is interested me as a friend and I totally missed it!
and Lol I just checked out that picture! hilarious!:) I could see that! My brain also does that a lot:)
😀
Maybe the question should say “look at intensely” instead of examine to clarify for the extreme literalists.
I was also assuming it meant going over like a monkey grooming another 🙂 If I hadn’t read this I’d still be on that image. I just figured that if some people enjoy touching various objects / materials then there’d also be ones who’d want to stroke your hair and play with it. Perfectly logical. But obviously wrong 🙂 Maybe I need to redo the quiz!
I’ve come out as slightly less Aspie on this version but it all depends on how you read the questions and how appropriate they are to your particular life. I could come up with different answers entirely if there was the option of saying ‘well if this was like that, and this applied, then…. but if it was like this then….’ I like to answer accurately and a lot of these qs don’t allow that.
I agree with wanting to qualify answers and have more explanation for some of the questions. It’s so hard to guess at what some of them mean exactly.
And I’m feeling much less weird now that others have said they pictured monkeys grooming. (Also, I might have actually been doing some monkey grooming on my husband’s increasingly long hair this morning. ahem.)
Absolutely agree. My boyfriend has been thinking I might be an Aspie ever since he worked with autistic kids. But what got me to finally schedule a diagnosis (it hasn’t taken place yet) was an article about what universities could do so Aspies have the same chances as other students. One Aspie said she’d like to get extra time on the exams, so she could write down the several different ways a question can be understood and answer all of them. I struggle with language that isn’t as precise as it could be all the time, and obviously I’m not alone. It’s a little sad the wording of the quiz doesn’t take that into account.
So frustrating. If they could spend a day inside our heads, I’m sure there would suddenly be nothing unexplainable about it!
Oh the monkey picture! That’s me! I took the question literally too but I was like, “Dude! I totally do that!” I examine hair in Kmarie’s way too, but I love to do the monkey picking thing. It is deeply satisfying–drives my kids and husband nuts though. 🙂
🙂
Oh that’s so funny! I took that question literally too. I could just see the monkeys grooming each other. It never occurred to me that the question meant anything else. Examine the hair means, examine the hair, like picking it apart, looking at the roots etc. That seemed such an odd question to ask. Now as to noticing details, yes, I notice things like hairstyle, color, clothing, I actually look at those things rather than directly at someone’s eyes or face directly.
I have not retaken the test since this new version came out. I’m still settling in with my official Aspie diagnosis and the idea of sitting through another one of these tests is more than I want to do. The “Control” questions, the way the questions are worded related to relationships, and the afraid in safe situations kind of questions. I feel like a test monkey just reading some of these questions. Urgh!
I notice all sorts of “odd” details about people too and I think that would actually be a better question than the hair examining one because it would apply to more aspies. Like the other day I was talking to someone and he had a little stubble whereas the previous two times I met him he didn’t have any and I couldn’t stop staring at it. There was nothing particularly interesting about it – it was just a change in visual details that my brain latched onto.
Ha, another thing I notice. When my husband shaves and misses the little bit of beard that is in the valley at the middle of his lower lip I always see it. It’s a small spot but I always see it and notice those kinds of ‘amiss” details with others too. It’s like that puzzle thing that was in the comics in the paper. Two pictures and you compared them to see what was different or missing. Some things were subtle, others more hidden but I always found them.
I’m not sure if it is possible to separate examining hair as a stim or as similar to grooming in primates. The current placement in the neurodiverse relationship category suggests it is similar to grooming in primates, and not a generic stim. That’s also the context I discovered it in.
Yes, “Are you sometimes afraid in safe situations? ” is a sensory issue, and it is classified as such in version 4.
there were lots of questions I even didn’t know how to answer.
The test is very western (may be even american) centered, and I think the thing with confession is about Christianity or something like that.
the question about polyamory was funny to me, because I am already poly. 😛
(and the sexuality questions are quite…heteronormative…
I think the test author is located in Europe if I’m remembering correctly.
I interpreted the confessing question to be tied to an intense need for honesty (which is a common aspie trait, though it could also be OCD-related).
So I guess you would consider polyamory then . . . 😛
Oh, so thats what it was about!
But some of the questions were really not clear at all.
It was my first time to do the test, and I was actually surprised to get 154/200 for aspie and 50 for NT.
my partner broke the test…he got mixed results of both NT and aspie traits. 😛
Mixed results seems to be a common outcome. It happens when the “spread” between the aspie and NT scores is less than 35 points.
I got mixed results as well. I am diagnosed ADHD though, so I figured that’s why it came up with that for me.
Leif Ekblad is from Sweden and an Aspie himself. Without falling for cliches, his cultural background may explain some of the formulations.
You can find a lot more about him either here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rdos
and links from there
or directly at his homepage here:
rdos.net/eng/
The “confession” issue has been removed, and most of the previous sexuality related questions has been as well and were replaced with better questions in most cases. Polyamory now is only mentioned as a possible neurodiverse relationship issue (it has low relevance but firmly correlates with the gruop). LGBT-related issues are neither part of the questions nor mentioned as they have too low relevance. About the only one that is relevant is being bisexual, and then only for women.
How is being bisexual & women even relevant?
Bisexuality in women tend to be fetishiezed and over sexualised, while not actually being believed and seen as a thing to please the men watching.
I don’t remember what my scores were when I took it before, but this time I got 138/200 and 75/200, “very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)”.
I actually do the walking behind/getting uncomfortable if people I’m with are behind me, but it’s more about keeping them in my field of vision, so I can see changes and get a head start in reacting to anything that changes in whatever our situation/environment is. And I think you’re right about the slowly flowing water thing, it’s for visual stimmers. I tend to use looking into a fire more than flowing water, but it’s a similar calming effect. And I took the ‘afraid in safe situations’ as a potential sign of general anxiety. I felt that a lot when I was a kid, particularly in school because I felt anxiety/fear about what might be coming, even if where I currently was, I was completely safe/alone.
The ‘walking behind people’ question is from the Neurodiverse Attachment group, in which a high score indicates attachment disorder. I almost answer positively for the same reason that you did, because I don’t like having people walk behind me for safety reasons, but after thinking about it, I decided that it didn’t apply to people I’m attached to, only to strangers.
Good point about the “afraid in safe situations” being related to anxiety disorders. I think that’s probably a stock question on any anxiety disorder trait inventory. I had some more thoughts about this in general in my reply to Kmarie above, so I’ll spare you. 🙂
When i first read the question (originally) I assumed it was referring solely to when you were walking with someone else and I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t be walking next to them (pavement width permitting).
And again the safe situations one could have several answers depending on whether it refers to me walking down a path with my dog that is likely to be safe but you never know (slightly scary), or or in a genuinely safe, no reason to get paranoid situation where I’m perfectly calm (provided I haven’t just watched an episode of Criminal Minds)
I can’t help thinking that whoever wrote the questions lacked imagination and depth of thought.
Before I had an even split between being neurodiverse and neurotypical, but that was before I moved. After I moved, I got the result “very likely neurodiverse (Aspie).”
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 136 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 81 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)
And I know you mentioned feel like you were struggling more since moving due to a lack of daily supports, so the increase makes a lot of sense.
Yeah! That’s why I think including a change in environment is a good way to test how someone would tend to react to a new situation, almost like seeing someone in their natural habitat.
I did the tests before and even in the final version the score is still 152 +/-2 for neurodiverse.
Interesting!
This will be interesting, to understate it, to compare to the results of my diagnosis which I am in the middle of at this time. I will know the results sometime in January of the new year. Here is what the new aspie quiz showed about me:
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 176 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 37 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)
That will be interesting. I hope the diagnostic process is going well.
I was totally distracted by the fact that the “criticism, correction, direction” question appeared twice! At first I thought–like you did–that it must be a check question. But the wording is such that my answers were different for the two versions: the first asks whether you accept criticism graciously (answer: sometimes), while the second asks whether you have difficulty accepting criticism (answer: always). I’ve learned through effort and exposure to outwardly accept criticism in a more “socially appropriate” way, but internally I still have a great deal of trouble with it. So the two questions actually seem quite different to me, but perhaps the test-makers really did mean for them to be the same…
Now I’m wondering if I answered them differently or not . . . I’m much the same way with criticism as you. 🙂
I’m now wondering if I actually read what the question asked and didn’t just read a couple of words and assume I knew what the rest was!
I like the Aspie Quiz, it is entertaining and I found the result quite accurate (haven’t tried the new one though). However, what are Leif Ekblad’s credentials for writing the paper? The abstract doesn’t sound right, it sounds bombastic in a way where a scientific paper usually would (or should) caution about its conclusions. The papers’ content is written in an academic tone and has some nice statistical graphs… which I can’t quite evaluate, but I’m vaguely considering to email it to my old Statisics teacher and ask about his impression.
I know Leif Ekblad for (besides the ASpie Quiz) his theory about autism & neanderthalers. The arguments for that theory are unscientific and makes me distrust whatever other “science” he writes, even though it isn’t the same topic. Perhaps this paper (the one you link to) is fully scientifically legitimate, I just need more before trusting it, its academic tone & nice graphs (and the popularity of the Aspie Quiz) isn’t enough.
I’ve always found it to be really accurate too and that seems to hold up with the major revision.
I have mixed feelings about the academic paper. I think it’s great that he’s taken the step to legitimize the quiz more by publishing a paper about it. His sample sizes and the number of tests that he’s validated it against are unparalleled among all of the screening tests in use. But the paper feels overarching and I think falls short of what it’s stated aim is. It might have been better to simply write the paper as a validation of the test itself for identifying those on the spectrum rather than trying to define neurodiversity.
I can’t speak to the statistics because other than the correlation tables, the statistics and models are way beyond anything I learned in stats or econometrics. The paper was published in an open source journal, which is great because it’s accessible to all but raises the question of how rigorous the peer review and publication standards. I did some research about Sage OPEN but couldn’t pin down with journal this particular paper was published in so I could find an influence ranking or any other data about what percent of submissions are published.
So I have reservations similar to yours (and take issue with some of the language used in the paper), but I think it’s a step in the right direction for an instrument that is probably the best one out there at identifying people who are on the spectrum and has been designed by someone who is himself neurodivergent.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 154 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 80 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)
Some questions I found hard to interpret. For example: The hair examining one I first thought of physically examining then thought, surely not, and realised it meant visual examination. Questions should be clearer. One tends to take things literally and so if not worded properly then the score will be different depending on the interpretation.
What is the question with odd hair all about?
The odd hair question was so bizarre! Especially because it seemed to be talking about naturally odd hair rather than non-typical hair styles. What do cow licks have to do with autism?
I was wondering if it was implying that we don’t brush our hair, leading to don’t worry about appearance, linking with the other question. If one has long hair then cowlicks become irrelevant anyway. Perhaps it has to do with the number of cowlicks? For men it matters more I think? Who knows? 🙂
The possible function of odd hair is explained in the new PDF: As a possible way of identifying people. It’s part of the neurodiverse relationship category, so I’d say it is mostly to identify potential partners. That was also the context I first suspected its function in, and which made me evaluate it. In fact, this is the ONLY physical marker that has passed an evaluation in Aspie Quiz.
The hair examining question threw quite a few of us! I agree that as a group we’re more likely than the average bear to take things literally, which makes careful wording all the more important. Especially since the test is taken without a facilitator who could potentially clarify questions.
I have no idea about the odd hair question and have always found it puzzling.
Got neurodiverse score of 143 and NT score of 72. Likely neurodiverse, though I’m noticing most of you have much lower NT scores than me.
I’ve been reading a lot about autism/Asperger’s and sometimes I feel like it really fits me and sometimes I don’t. I’m just trying to figure out what the deal with my brain is.
Generally as long as you have at least 35 points between your ND and NT scores, you’ll get a clear result. Also, as you first start to learn about Asperger’s/autism, it can take some time to identify all of the traits that you have. For the longest time I was convinced that I didn’t stim until I learned how many ways of stimming exist and how I’d learned to subvert my stims into things that are much less noticeable.
That’s a good point. I wish the DSM criteria were more detailed so that I actually knew what they mean by some things. And I also find it’s hard to identify some traits in yourself without outside perspective. I get stuck on those things, but I keep learning more about myself (for better or for worse) as I do more research.
Have you read “I Think I Might Be Autistic? It is very thorough in detailing the DSM-V and many of the various traits that we have. I know we are always discovering more as we hear other Aspies talking about their traits and stims, but the list of traits that is in this book is great and it pretty clearly details what they are looking for in the testing. It was helpful for me both before, and after my testing when I got my results. 🙂
🙂
I saw that on the site and I think I’ll look into it. Thanks for the responses 🙂
I have a bit of trouble with self reporting because for many of the questions, I just don’t know. My old scores leaned towards aspie but my new score (the first time I did the test today) had me divided between neurotypical and neurodiverse. I did the test again after dinner with my husband in the room to get rid of all of the ‘not sure’ answers and my score leaned back towards aspie, but not as far as when I first took the test last year.
I didn’t like the new test as much as I have many traits that some people would describe as neurotypical but I express them in an aspie way. The criticism questions for instance. I always accept criticism calmly because I feel like that is the socially appropriate thing to do, but underneath it really gets to me if it is harsh or if I disagree with it. I will quietly beat it over the head until I come to terms with it but I can’t stand conflict of any kind so I wouldn’t generally argue because it makes me so anxious that it feels dangerous. Also the question about collecting and cataloging information bothered me because I am an obsessive seeker of information, but I don’t catalog it. I just have to know. Once I find what I’m looking for I will even forget it, but I love to find it. So I didn’t know how to answer the question because I don’t catalog my information. I also disliked how the relationship questions didn’t seem to take into account people who either are not seeking a relationship or who are in a long term relationship. I had to ask my husband if I flirt and apparently I didn’t start flirting with him until after we had already gone to bed with each other and even now my flirting is pretty bouncy and non-standard– But I didn’t know that.
I do love to watch slowly moving water, but then I am a visual stimmer,
I am totally with you on the criticism and collecting info points – I love knowing stuff but I don’t need to collate it unless randomly shoving it into my brain counts. And I’ll rarely express negative emotions at people but will rant and rave inwardly. So yes, you can give NT answers but the actual interpretation and meaning behind them is all Aspie.
Changed the cataloging and collecting item to use ‘and/or’ instead of ‘and’. Also reworded the criticism items to be more similar.
Hmmm. I definitely read that as cataloging in my brain, not physically. Perhaps because that’s how I imagine my brain works, with different compartments all joined together, with some trigger allowing me to pull out a random file and read its contents. I have a near-photographic memory, however, so perhaps that’s why.
My memory is pretty good but I only keep facts that are interesting to me. If my current phone number, for instance, doesn’t seem interesting to me, I have a hard time remembering it. But maybe I *do* catalog my facts in a sense though, because I love, love, love, writing stories and often my fact seeking is tied to that. I won’t include certain ideas in my plots unless I have my facts absolutely in order.
I agree that the relationship questions seemed applicable only to people who are actively dating. And I’m very much like you in that I love learning new things and will actively seek out odd or seemingly irrelevant bits of knowledge but don’t do much cataloging other than in my head.
It’s definitely helpful to have someone who can offer a second opinion on the questions. I did that the second time I took it and was surprised at how my husband noticed things that I do that went completely unnoticed by me.
I’m a test junkie! My first time taking the quiz was back in September. I had a score of 143/200 autistic and 69/200 allistic. Today it was 147/200 autistic and 81/200 allistic. So I both more normal and more weird than I was a few months ago! Perhaps I was more reserved the first time around? Possibility of OCD and ADD both times. As my mom jokes, that must mean I only want everything perfect for a second before I want to do something different. 😉
I go with my inward feelings, like on criticism and stuff. I may have my diplomatic way of saying “as a wife, mom, accountant, and artist, I am an incredibly busy person, and unless you have ordered a commission, I cannot adjust any drawing to your liking” when somebody starts complaining about my artwork, while on the inside I’m still saying “shut up and bugger off, if I wanted your opinion I’d tell you”.
The only question I have an issue with is “do you have trouble reading clocks” because they take it as a sign of dyslexia. I simply have trouble with understanding digital clocks, I don’t see them all mixed up. They’re just vague numbers that only suggest what time it is. I prefer analog clocks because I can SEE what time it is and the relation the numbers have with each other. I don’t know if that’s a disassociate problem or if it actually is a part of dyslexia, I’ve never found anybody with the same complaint. And I’m not sure how having weird hair or making up your own faith leads to being a sexual deviant. That one’s always baffled me. Reminds me of some very amusing tales on various religions who were convinced if you were of any religion but theirs, you must have had sex in a weird way. Kind of like old maps had “here be dragons” in uncharted areas, thus unknown religions were marked “here be orgies”. I guess since they’re still figuring out autism, for now we are “here be dragon orgies” or something? I better stop, my twisted sense of humor is running full speed into a very inappropriate tangent…
Other than that, still my favorite autism quiz! And I still prefer it and the RAADS-R over the AQ one, the AQ is just a social quiz and doesn’t take into account stimming or sensory issues. In my opinion, autism is of the four S’s: social, stimming, sensory, and specialties (interests, obsessions, strengths like organizing, etc.). Which might be that suggested OCD coming through, heehee.
“Here be dragon orgies,” made me smile. 🙂
It has been established that autistic people commonly love fantasy. 😉
I definitely fall into that category. A two second glace at my bookshelf would be enough to tell. 🙂
Dragon orgies! This had me laughing out loud this morning as I was reading it.
It seems like we all have some issues with the quiz and yet still find it to be a favorite, which I think says a lot about how much work must have gone into finding questions that mostly work (regardless of why they work, in some cases).
There’s a new short version of the RAADS-R that I’m going to try to write up for next week. I find the RAADS frustrating and also pretty social focused, though not as much as the AQ (which I find maddening).
I look forward to the RAADS-R redo. =)
One of my other reasons for preferring the Aspie Quiz over the AQ is my dad scored as autistic on the AQ and heavily allistic on the Aspie Quiz. While he is very antisocial and not that fond of heavy perfume, we all know he’s not autistic by a long shot. So to me it’s much more accurate.
Is there a no cost good IQ type test available anywhere? I started to take the one where you look at shapes and lines etc. and did the whole thing (more than a half hour – online) then at the end of it when I was finished discovered there was a fee for it. Urgghh!
I took one like that online last year and it was free and fairly accurate (based on the IQ test I did with my AS evaluation). I wish I could remember how I located it. It had something to do with being an IQ test that wasn’t dependent on language or culture maybe? But maybe not.
If I can find it, I’ll come back with a link.
Thanks! I’ll keep an eye out. 🙂
I got 144 neurodiverse and 69 neurotypical (perhaps an appropriate number for the neurotypical score, since, like you, it seems like the sex questions were the ones that drove my neurotypical score up!)
I’ve taken this test in a couple different iterations, although I don’t remember my past scores (except that I do know they always showed up as “most likely an aspie,” which was very meaningful to me when I first discovered the test early in my self-diagnosis journey).
I have such mixed feelings about it, though. There are good things, for sure, and I’m a big fan of the detailed score break down and the cool spiderweb graphs. But like you, I found the equation of asexuality and autism deeply unfortunate. In addition, I’m really annoyed by how the test equates typically male-socialized behaviors with neurodiversity and typically female-socialized ones with neurotypicality. I’m particularly mad at the “do you take pride in your appearance?” question, which earned me a whopping 3.79 neurotypical points and 0 Aspie points. I know lots of autistic people (mostly women, because our culture socializes women to do this and not men), online and in real life, who take pride in their appearance and enjoy fashion or makeup or whatever. I mean, nail polish has become somewhat of a special interest to me in recent years, and I have my nail polish organized and catalogued in a spreadsheet… Plus, touching my smooth polished nails or rubbing them against my lips is one of my stims, too (so is picking off my nail polish, but that one I’m trying to train myself out of…).
Sorry, nail polish tangent there! Anyway, that and several other questions (the ones about social traits that tend to be socialized into girls of any neurotype, like being good at teamwork and enjoying gossip) seem to lean uncomfortably close to the extreme male brain type theories.
I’m also kind of unhappy with the idea that autistic social traits include long-lasting urges to take revenge and disrupting (I read it as intentionally disrupting, out of malice etc.) others’ activities. Especially the latter, if I’m reading it right. I hate when people on our own side, so to speak, also conflate being autistic with being a jerk.
The attachment-related questions are bizarrely specific, too. I don’t inspect people’s hair (I also read that as meaning grooming like a monkey! But I don’t visually inspect hair, either) or memorize their schedules, but my boyfriend could certainly tell you that I have all sorts of weird, non-normative ways of expressing affection.
I also get weirded out by the psychic abilities questions every time, although those were not in the score report so it seems like they’re control questions.
Whew, lots of feels about this test– like I said, it was very meaningful in my autism journey and back a few years ago I didn’t notice the flaws I do now. But it’s still valuable and I appreciate it because it clearly gives more of an inside view than the AQ test and similar free online tests that are so clearly created by non-autistics.
Is it weird that I have a really happy feeling at the thought of you cataloguing your nail varnish in a spreadsheet? I love being so organised and – oh, strange thought – maybe I do collate stuff more than I thought! I’ve just realised how I have lists of my DVDs, the contents of my loft, the contents of my garage cupboards, the kitchen cupboards and freezer…… Oh wow, I’ve just learnt something new about myself 🙂
I think the disrupting might be related to our attachment to our own routines which can disrupt other people’s activities if the two clash. Although it could be taken as intentionally disrupting, which is something that a lot of us get hit with and could definitely bring up uncomfortable feelings in the context of the test. As a test of neurodiversity, I think the wording of some of the questions and even moreso of the detailed explanations in the PDF misses the mark. Neurodiversity is as much a movement and a culture as a definition of a set of traits and in that sense, it benefits from being approached in a positive way. The things that you and others have pointed out along the lines of equating ND traits with negative character traits are valid criticisms. At the very least, neutral wording would be good.
And I have a lot of feelings too apparently.
There are several questions in the quiz that have more relevance for women than for men that will give men lower neurodiverse scores, so I don’t actually find it a big problem that there are a few that works in the opposite direction. I think this issue has a good balance, and it woud be a bad idea to exclude questions that are gender-biased. For instance, being asexual is also gender biased and gives women higher scores on average because of that.
The questions in the neurodiverse social group are about being self-centered and it does include seemingly negative traits such as being obstructive and seeking revenge. It wouldn’t be scientific to exclude them because they are judged as negative traits by our culture.
Done it again and this time I’m 121 of 200 for Aspie (in April I was 133) and 77 of 200 for N/t (same as April). But then I only tend to pick definitely yes / a lot if I’m really, really convinced about something. Otherwise it’s a 1 (unless obviously it’s a no (0). And that’s me generally – if I have to mark myself out of 10 I’ll rarely go for anything higher than a 7 (except for being introverted where I’d go for a very solid 9 – where it could be a 10). So I assume that will skew it downwards. And that’s before we take into account the ‘it depends’ questions!
It definitely sounds like your circumspect approach causes the results to skew downward for you on just about any self-rating test. 🙂
There seriously needs to be an “it depends” option on these quizzes. With a text box for our 17 paragraph explanations.
YES! nods emphatically and with vigor.
On the ‘it depends” option that is.
Amen to that 🙂
Well I still get a ‘you are bit of both ‘ score, although that does include a high aspie score on perception and contact (which figures). And a graph picture of a cookie cutter christmas angel without a head…
The water thing is definitely visual stimming and I never knew I did it until I took the quiz first time round, but I do, a lot, and take photos of water (and light, shadows, clouds), a lot!
The following behind the group is something I do on hikes, I always thought it was a safety thing (make sure you have everyone accounted for), but I also do it when walking with my friend and it annoys her.
[img]http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12e.php?p1=44&p2=48&p3=84&p4=48&p5=44&p6=48&p7=24&p8=35&p9=81&p10=78&p11=72&p12=10[/img]
Very festive (it worked for me) 🙂
The number of reasons that people walk behind people seems to be quite varied. I wonder if it’s something a lot of people do and therefor isn’t especially meaningful as a trait. (although someone must be walking in front, right?)
I always thought my spouse was the more obvious aspie, but lately with me beginning to wonder if I am also autistic, my spouse declared they think I’m even more aspie than them. Which goes against common assumptions. But I might have to give my spouse a point, on the walking behind question…maybe. I definitely find myself walking behind in groups. On hikes or any time I’m in a group, I feel a responsibility to not leave someone behind, and don’t want to lead somewhere unless I know that’s where everyone wants to go. If I feel nervous about having someone I know & trust behind me, it is because I don’t want to be oblivious to if something is going on with them (tripping, falling behind, stopped to look at something, not wanting them feeling left out, etc.) If I am ever nervous about strangers behind me, well, I am a female of small stature & it is not irrational to be aware of your surroundings. My spouse on the other hand is always zooming ahead when with a group, and does not like to wait for consensus building. (Long vs. short legs also probably plays a partial role, too!) My spouse is known for going off & leaving the rest of the group to worry/wonder where they are. Even if we are not currently walking, my spouse has little patience for consensus building when making group plans. I’m not sure that the way that following/walking behind question plays out for me and my spouse (and it looks like for Random Pattern) is what the test maker was trying to get at. There were quite a few questions where I feel like the reasons behind answers would be very valuable when trying to make any sort of conclusions or interpretations from the answers. The “that depends” box is really an option that would help offer more insight and accuracy…but I can understand if someone is reluctant to want to have the sheer mountain of data to sift through that giving aspies free-reign to in-detail analyze the questions & their responses would unleash.
Well that link to my graph didn’t work did it! Never mind.
Hey Cynthia…I don’t know if you know any families on the Spectrum with younger children but if you do this may be enjoyable for them. I only wish I would have discovered it sooner than I did! http://worldwecreate.blogspot.ca/2014/12/excellent-exercise-cosmic-kids-for.html
I also think it would be a great thing to do instead of some gym activities in schools for those with sensory needs or issues…
Thank you for sharing – great post and great resource. I pinned your post to the Stimtastic “resources” Pinterest board. 🙂
Oh, what a great site! Thanks for sharing it. I think this is great for kids on the spectrum, as well as adult Aspies. Managing stress, supporting better sleep etc. are all good things that can be a result of a movement program and Yoga certainly fits into that. 🙂
As I was told repeatedly that lengthy comments are OK: here I am at it again. Longer than ever 🙂
——— infodumping on ————-
I collected some factual information on the Aspie Quiz, in part to questions raised throughout the comments. Can’t help this habit, part of my professional life.
As most of you will have seen, versions 2 and 1 are still available, unfortunately not in English anymore. Since V2 is still available in my mother tongue, I retook it for the fourth time. There were always at least six months in between (Yes, I did keep the dates). Comparison to the two recent runs of V3 resulted in the following numbers:
V2: 157 +/- 12 ND, 50 + /- 8 NT, average difference 107
V3: 144 +/- 4 ND, 83 +/- 3 NT, ‘average’ difference 61
Mathematicians, please don’t kill me for doing a +/- on two values only.
Next I analyzed the questions that ‘disappeared’ due to the introduction of the ‘sex-related’ ones, as collectively men-tioned several times. They replaced several, in my personal opinion, ‘meaningful’ questions, in the sense as most of us define Aspieness. From medical sources so far I found no clear trend in sexual preferences / interest in connection to ASD / ADHD / ACD and … Tried to formulate the previous sentence cautiously. Or to put it differently: it seems that our desires are the same. Whether we can realize these preferences in real life is another story. Consequence: questions towards sexual interests are probably not diagnostic!
In the last decades love life became a widely diversified aspect of Western society, as most will concede. Thus I hypothesize that it is particularly hard to delineate an Aspie-specific discrepancy due to large statistical ‘noise’. Might this also explain why several of us scored comparatively higher in the NT branch in the new version? I would love to see more comparative data on test versions 2 and 3 either here or somewhere in the future to look at the trend.
Minor point. The arrangement of the categories in the spider web were changed – what in my case looked like an an-gel flying horizontally now has the shape of a distorted map of the Antarctic. 😀
As to the journal ‘SAGE open’ where the Aspie Quiz was published: It clearly is a mainstream scientific journal by all usual standards like peer review, listing in scholarly databases (Scopus; not [yet?] in PubMed, SAGE one is only three years old) or citation in other scientific work. Importantly, even by comparison to giants in the scientific publishing business like ‘Nature’ or ‘Science’, Leif Ekblads article met with a lot of attention as can be seen here: sgo.sagepub.com/content/3/3/2158244013497722.article-info.
Leif Ekblad has an MSc in electronics and works as a programmer. This most likely explains his familiarity with statis-tics and development of computer-based questionnaires. The article on the Aspie quiz appears to be his first pub-lished scientific piece of work but, as mentioned, gets a lot of attention.
——— infodumping off 🙂 ————-
A most helpful infodump. Thank you. I found myself nodding at pretty much everything you said.
I’m amused by the commenters who have used their spider web as a rorshach test. My new one is a rather boring elongated version of my previous one. Or I lack imagination. 🙂
If I may add one more ‘factual’ note for readers who were not yet here when you wrote on V2 of the quiz and compared it to the AQ test?
Apparently, most commenters who compared the two assessments found themselves more closely represented by the quiz whether V2 or V3 than by the AQ test. Yet, in the largest scientific literature database PubMed the AQ is referred to 1692 times whereas the quiz comes up with … zero.
Mean interpretation: whatever ‘we’ feel as a group – the specialists know better. After all we have no academic degree in psychology, psychiatry or such. Well at least most Aspies don’t. 🙂 Less nasty: AQ was initially developed by Simon Baron-Cohen who, as a prominent psychopathologist, gets more attention than Leif Ekblad, an ‘amateur’, on the spectrum.
I definitely think the Aspie Quiz is both a better indicator than the AQ and generally more autistic friendly in the way questions are worded, etc. Also less gender biased.
SBC has wide-ranging influence in the autism research community due to both his current position and the research “lineage” that he’s from. Fortunately, the internet has made things much more democratic and we “groundlings” are free to carry on with our citizen science, crowd sourced consensuses and first-person accounts of our experiences regardless of how the “experts” view it. 🙂
Reblogged this on Sonnolenta… A Neurodivergent Journey and commented:
I often have friends and blog visitors who suspect they might be on the spectrum, and Musings of an Aspie blog is an excellent and trusted resource on which to begin your journey. Diagnostic online quizzes are unofficial diagnostic tools, but they can be rather enlightening, and I took as many as I could find when my PDOC first suspected Autism. Here’s my results!
Thank you for the reblog and for adding your results. 🙂
Just wanted to leave a comment RE: “walking behind people.”
I definitely do this. And I’m a nanny for a “neurodiverse” little boy who also does it. I notice that other autistic people I’ve known tend to do this, and especially children.
For me, at least, my tendency to walk behind someone is directly in proportion to how familiar I am with a place/situation, how tired I am, or how overwhelming my environment is. I walk behind the person I’m with (usually my partner) because it is so that I can follow them, instead of worrying about my own navigation. If I’m in a crowd, at an airport, at a convention, or traveling through a new city on vacation, being able to follow someone (while looking at the ground, at their feet, and holding on to them with one hand) means that I can make sure I get where I need to go. Getting myself through an airport (navigating the crowds, finding the correct gate, and so on) is very overwhelming for me, and having to find my own way makes the entire scenario exponentially harder. If I can walk behind my partner it means I can be guided through the situation.
This is also why autistic people who get service dogs often receive dogs who are task trained for some basic guiding, to guide their human partner through crowds, towards exits or bathrooms, and so on. It’s the being lead element of following that’s important.
This has made me think a lot. If I’m walking along talking to someone I like them to be next to me so that I’ve fewer distractions (not having to think about whether they can hear me or if I can hear them etc.) but reading your post I’ve realised that if I’m walking somewhere specific rather than just round the playing field dog-walking, and especially if I’m walking into a place, I do actually like to be behind someone following them in. I don’t like to be the first through the door – it’s too exposed somehow.
That’s one of the things I like about my dog – she’s always off in front, leading me along!
I have learnt so much about myself being on this site – there are so many points that people make that get me thinking and noticing more about myself. Stuff that otherwise I take for granted or overlook. It’s like having multiple Christmases! And that’s before I get started on reading all the books I’ve got on it 🙂
Oh man, I’d never thought about that before, but you’re totally right about the dog thing. It’s great walking with a dog because the dog will always be in front, like a little shield. Very comforting 🙂
Yes, I do always have a feeling of safeness with her like she’s a forcefield (and even when I’m out in the car on my own but I think of her) – not physical safety per se, just the feeling that I’m not on my own facing the world. A comfort blanket on legs.
My dog is definitely a comfort blanket on legs. Great analogy. I’ve discovered that I’m much less likely to feel overloaded when I travel with her. I think part of it is that she’s so soothing to sit with and pet and she’s really perceptive to my moods, but it’s also the distraction of having a dog to look after and the routine of her day that settles me.
And while she’s not big, she is very protective of me so there’s a safety element too. The one time I was out with her and felt a little threatened by a person approaching me, she got between us and growled/barked until the person moved away. Which is funny because around friendly strangers, she’ll hide between my legs and act like someone wanting to pet her is the scariest thing in the world.
Oh, great point about following people in unfamiliar or crowded areas. I do that when I’m feeling overwhelmed for sure.
I wonder if this question actually positively identifies aspies for this reason, rather than for the “attachment” reason that the study author has proposed.
Oh, neat, is there a page where the information about the study can be found? (Proposed explanations for questions, etc.) Is it out in the open on that page and I’ve just been missing it?
I think the tough thing with identifying the “why” behind autistic behaviors is the same thing that scientists encounter doing cultural studies. I love Stephen Shore’s metaphor that autism is essentially a different culture (which covers all the bases of “different but not less, disabled but sometimes enabled, not broken just other” nicely) because it’s really accurate, especially in instances like these. Just like when doing a cultural study, when describing and attributing autistic behaviors it’s very difficult to get at the motivations behind behaviors, which is why all good autism assessments (and cultural studies) describe behaviors from observance without making qualitative or explanatory statements.
There is a huge amount of background information here: http://www.rdos.net/eng/
There is also a personalized PDF that you can download on the results page after you complete the test.
Navigation is a good reason in unfamiliar territory. I do that, especially when it’s somebody taking me to see something. I don’t walk beside, I walk behind unless it’s very open and they’re feeling chatty. For the most part, I walk behind somebody because it’s harder for me to become separated from them. Sure, we all have cell phones these days and can call each other to say “go the fountain with the naked ladies, I’ll meet you there!”, but that’s an annoying waste of time. Unless you like the fountain and/or the statues.
…. ugg.
I almost dont even need to, or want to do this one, based on reading the comments here, the average number of specific test topics discussed by the majority on this thread, and combined with the facts I know about myself …
1. This test can not be taken from my iphone. (had to do it on real computer before)
2. I could not possibley care any less than I do now about romance or romantic intimacey with any human being on the planet, other than just enjoying it as part of a movie plot, & only then if it’s not the whole-focus-mushy-ridiculous kind.
3. I stare at texture, colour ect and hair has a LOT of it.
4. I am extremely honest, but was told by a person who has a life-long affinity for going to state penitentaries, that I have a ‘criminal mind’. This is because I have an extremely adequate
‘potential danger’ log of learned experiences, or things Ive seen/read about that can feasibley happen.
For example, on a long overseas flight, my daughter may sleep. But what if someone messes with your carry on or your bag in the overhead?
If youre in the on the NY subway with people crammed together, studying your phone, how do you now someone is not reaching in your bag or something?
I live in a medium-size southern town where everyone kinda knows everyone – but I am extremely aware of everything around me when shopping, I am.constantly feeling or mentally aware of my keys on my beltloop or my checkbook in my back pocket, my phone in my front pocket.
When getting in/out of my vehicle I make mental notes of every vehicle/people sitting in them around me – constant assessment. Mightve made a good cop …
My daughters (and other people) always think I go WAY overboard detailing every possible danger on their excursions or activities. I am not paranoid, just over-insulated with possibilities based on facts. No one needs to be aware of how to have fun (although additional ideas can be added to an event also) Most people simply need to be m.ore aware of potential danger.If they were, MAYBE there would be a dramatic decrease of accidents or robberies.
5. I do not ‘give a rip’ about my appearance (ha-pun intended) – I have tried to in the past, I have tried to do dress up – there is no humanly possible way to dress up comfortabley – I mean ‘dress up’ in the way of ‘mainstream’ business, church, etc. unless they are in flats, cotton, no girdles-support accessories, etc, people are lying if they say they are comfortable dressed up. Most people trade or interpret ‘comfort’ for looking nice and loving the IDEA of being dressed up. Every human being wants to go home at the end of dress up and get into something & comfortable IMMEDIATELY.
6. If every one were honest & open to.exchange of ideas combined creativity with all the known facts, and used logic & reasoning WITHOUT emotion, the words ‘blunt’ & ‘hurt feelings’ would not be in our vocabulary.
Meanwhile, when I can get to a computer, I will take the test because they’re kinda fun. They’re fun because I have finally found tests that ask some interesting things about the way I think/dont think, rather than other kinds of tests that ask more irrelevant things, or repetative same-questions worded 5 different ways.
I hope we haven’t completely biased you against it! I always enjoy the quizzes when I take them, then find myself picking them to shreds afterwards.
Which is a very healthy Aspie approach, isn’t it? The shredding, I mean.
Indeed! 🙂
The last version 2 result I got, in March 2012, pre-diagnosis, was:
Your Aspie score: 123 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 69 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie
http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12c.php?p1=74&p2=70&p3=56&p4=85&p5=70&p6=67&p7=68&p8=72&p9=57&p10=51&p11=57&p12=85
I took version 3 in April this year and got:
Final version 3
Thank you for filling out this questionnaire.
Your Aspie score: 142 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 51 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie
http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12d.php?p1=82&p2=71&p3=79&p4=80&p5=72&p6=68&p7=77&p8=66&p9=43&p10=78&p11=60&p12=61
Taking it today, I got:
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 141 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 61 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)
http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12e.php?p1=93&p2=50&p3=81&p4=81&p5=63&p6=95&p7=37&p8=68&p9=94&p10=76&p11=48&p12=90
Which is remarkably similar to April really. Interesting that the ‘neurodiverse’ thing is newer than the change over to version 3. I checked the PDFs and the question sets in April’s were otherwise the same.
I still think that this test could be a lot more useful by entirely dropping the connection to hunting and actually directly focusing on stimming. I also have mixed feelings about the polyamory and asexuality questions (and I’m surprised it doesn’t ask something similar about gender identity on that basis). Partly, yes there absolutely are more autistic people in those communities than one would expect if going by the general population, but it’s been long observed that autistic people are far more likely to be open to recognising (other) ways that they are different from the norm and less likely to avoid doing things just because they’re considered socially unconventional. So it’s almost certainly misleading to imply that being poly or asexual is an autistic trait when it really isn’t.
Thank you for digging up your recent scores and posting them. The timing of the wording change is interesting. The paper was published in 2013 so it apparently wasn’t to coincide with that. I’m so not a fan of the wording change, especially the misuse of neurodiverse instead of neurodivergent.
I think a question about gender identity would actually track better with spectrum likelihood than sexuality questions, given the growing body of research on gender identity and autism.
Uhm, no, it’s not misleading. Being asexual is an neurodiverse / autistic trait (and especially an female neurodiverse trait). The fact that none of the LGBT-traits have been consistently linked with neurodiversity speaks against the idea that this is based on being unconventional. In fact, less than half of the females that end up with “very likely neurodiverse” select “no” on being asexual. In practice though, many of these women still have sex if they get a partner that is not asexual, so this is a real problem for many people.
As for gender identity issues, I find much of the information and science about that to be highly misleading. For instance the SAGE test (http://www.hemingways.org/GIDinfo/sage/) contains a huge amount of neurodiverse traits that they categorize as male traits, If somebody could come up with some good questions about GID that passes the relevance test in Aspie Quiz I’d definitely keep them, but right now there are none.
Oh no – not biased … as I said, tests are fun.
I realize in retrospect, my comments may have seemed cynical (which is a commonly unintended result of my ‘just the facts m’am’ mindset)
I guess people think Im rude, cynical, blunt, sardonic, sarcastic, etc etc …
(see fact 6 of previous reply-lol)
I also feel like, based on even just the (limited) knowledge I have gleaned from reading about Asperger’s on this one site since about March, combined with previous tests AND all this interesting new awareness & understanding of how I have actually been ‘ticking’ my whole life, I go around mentally sort of testing myself all the time – not ‘questioning’ myself, but analyzing & confirming several things . . . This is so enlightening and relieving to me, to have discovered the reason for being SO different.
Also, I personally prefer to avoid the word ‘diagnosis’ – which feels like a way of saying ‘here is the answer to your sickness’.
I much prefer ‘self-discovery’ which feels like ‘here is the answer to.your uniquely gifted mind’.
Meanwhile, I will likely not be able to return to this site over the next few days, so I would like to say…
Merry ChrisTmas & Happiest of Holidays to all of you who have also discovered your uniquely gifted minds.
“uniquely gifted mind” – I like that, I really like that. If I tell myself that then I feel really special – all shiny and glittery and sparkly.
And yes, a very Merry Christmas to everyone on here. It’s an amazing community, and a very special place. I can even imagine that there’s a big shiny star in the sky guiding us towards it – though it may just be that Cynthia has a few too many fairy lights on! Hoping that Santa delivers a big helping of spoons to all of us (and not just to dole out veg and eat my very tasty cherry pie with)
I generally see your communication style as honest and straightforward, which is the kind that works best for me. 🙂
Happy Holidays to you and to everyone!
Yes, please! Some spoons! Maybe I can get early delivery *before* this evening? I was good these months (ahm, sort of).
Oh my gosh so many comments. I think many of the comments are interesting and some of them probably should be addressed.
For one thing, the groups were redone because we (me and a professor I know) started using confirmative factor analysis, and it then turned out that there were some issues with the groups, like the hunting groups which were collapsed. I’m still a little bit hesitant about if the contact and attachment groups should be separate or combined. Factor analysis seems to favor combining them, but the case is not strong. However, that would mean going down to 10 groups instead of 12 and radically changing the spider-diagram again. I’ll have to decide on this soon. A major problem (as people also has discussed here) is that the NT attachment group only contains a few sex-related traits that have strong inter-correlations, and poor relevance, while the contact group has many of the typical problems in the relationship area. On the neurodiverse side, the contact group is poor and contains few relevant traits, while the attachment group contains the important differences. So I’ll probably combine them and then reduce the sex-related questions considerably as those have poor relevance.
As for LGBT, it’s been tested before, and none of these traits have neurodiverse relevance. In the current configuration, these traits all fit in the “neurodiverse contact” group, and correlate well with “do you have atypical sexual preferences”, but have much lower relevance. So including LGBT is not possible from a scientific POV,
The reason why the paper uses neurodiversity instead of autism / AS is mainly that Aspie Quiz wasn’t constructed by using diagnostic criteria (which was intentional), and it also hasn’t been evaluated directly against diagnosed populations (only by people checking their diagnosis online). This was also the major problem in the publication. I had to describe the neurodiverse and neurotypical factors used to score the test as those were objective and not subjective “selected” criteria as in ASD diagnosis. This is also the strength of the approach: I can change the test and include new relevant items without changing the average properties of the test because the new factor-loadings used to score it will make the scoring consistent. That’s also why people might interpret questions in ways that I didn’t think about, and this will then be reflected in factor loadings and future scorings.
In regards to the neurodiverse attachment questions. Many of these are things I’ve personally experienced. Some of them were first found in DSM tests for “attachment disorders” and I thought they have no idea about how this works! I know they are not diagnostic of ASD, but the related problems are very common in ASD/neurodiversity, so they should be included in neurodiversity. I also don’t think that people in long-term relationships will be unable to answer them. They can just go back to when they were single for some of the questions, while others apply even if you have been married for a long time like I have been. For the following issue, it was really a big thing to realize that while I really hate when strangers follow me, I can get a crush on a girl just by following her, and that I really don’t mind when people I’m attached to do it. The issue about staring and only looking at people you like have a similar connection to attachment.
So does being gay count as ‘atypical sexual preferences’? I’m never sure. To me it’s pretty damn ordinary whereas to others I should be struck down by a dozen lightening bolts and have a plague of locusts descend on my house.
For me it doesn’t, but a few people might still check it for that reason. Unusual sexual preferences primarily refer to paraphilias, and this is also supported by trying more controversial things a while back. And unusual sexual preferences actually have a good correlation to neurodiversity, something that being gay doesn’t have. Being lesbian has a better neurodiversity relation. This can be seen in this version for instance: http://www.rdos.net/eng/aspeval/quiz9.htm. Question 121 is “unusual sexual preferences”, which has similar relevance for both genders. Question 122 is being homo- or bisexual which mostly has relevance for female neurodiverse people only, and thus is gender biased. Question 123 is about BD/SM and has similar properties as question 122. This can also be seen in http://www.rdos.net/eng/aspeval/quiz8.htm (questions 114 and 115). Additionally, here question 116 about compulsive sexual behavior is biased towards male neurodiverse people. In the overview http://www.rdos.net/eng/aspeval/#136 it can be seen that these issues are related.
It’s all a tad confusing! I call myself ‘gay’ though being female I’m actually ‘lesbian’ but I’m not sure how a woman being attracted to a woman is more related to neurodiversity than a man being attracted to a man? And being a lesbian who doesn’t want actually want sex but still thinks about it (i.e. sort of asexual but not entirely) – does that make me tick the atypical box or not?! I’d have expected the answers to have a definitive meaning in the eyes of the questioners, even if to us they’re open to wide interpretation…
Why more neurodiverse girls are homo- and bisexual? Yes, I have a theory about this, but I don’t want to post it online just yet. Might put it up on my own blog at some point. The reason why being gay is not as significant for being neurodiverse as being lesbian has to do with much fewer neurodiverse males being gay. In fact, I think it might be a good idea to create a list (and eventually try to publish it) of all the traits that have been found to be gender-biased in the Aspie Quiz construction process. It’s not exactly traits that supports the “extreme male theory”.
As twisted as I am, I’d probably label people who intentionally look at things they don’t like as “masochistic” and in need of a therapist. 😉
Nothing can be 100% perfect and fail proof. But still one of the best quizzes I’ve seen and I’ll definitely take it every so often (with an account, of course!), especially when I know there’s been an update.
If it’s not a pain in the butt to do, may I request that some or many questions come with an example or explanatory sentence below, or one of those little questions marks you can mouse over for a clarification? In example, the criticism questions. Does “take badly” refer to how you externally express yourself regardless of how you feel on the inside or only to how you feel on the inside?
(And a more amusing example, the monkey grooming picture passed around because of how “examining interesting hair” was interpreted. It popped into my mind too!)
Previously 131/200 and 71/200 – very likely Aspie.
Yesterday 134/200 and 87/200 – very likely aspie.
Previously, I had a score in the 170s, I think? Now 163 Aspie and 32 non-aspie.
I found a few of the new questions hard to understand. Like, re-reading the question four or five times and going, “Nope, still dunno what he means.” Then I was getting hung up on definitions even on some of the older questions – like, define “conventional” humor. Like 30s slapstick or classic Abbot and Costello or Monty Python or do you mean do I laugh at stuff other people laugh at and what if the answer is “yes, but only if I’m with friends who are all as weird as me?” and yeah.
So over-thinking definitions that may have affected my score. That may also be due to the fact that I’m just coming off the holidays, I’m exhausted, and I had an incredibly busy weekend so my language abilities are kind of depleted – I’ve definitely been having a lot of receptive language issues lately, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s bleeding over into my reading/writing (normally reading/writing isn’t affected, but if I’m really tired it can be). Plus, I’m a lot more prone to get stuck on phrasing when I’m tired.
What all that ^^^ means is that I’m pretty sure my issues with question phrasing were just me and my brain not wanting to do language well today.
I found the questions related to the supernatural kind of weird. I don’t know why they were there. I’m guessing filler?
I don’t know why they’re there either. If you’re curious enough, you can look in the PDF to see what they’re grouped with or at the information pages on the test site to see if there are any correlations or other background info. One thing I love about the Aspie Quiz is how open source it is.
I did this quiz twice, with about 15 minutes inbetween (not long lol)
I’m really not sure of what to make of the results though.
The first time, I got 105 neurodiverse and 139 neurotypical, whereas the second time I got 114 neurodiverse and 135 neurotypical. Both times it said I’m a mixture of traits, how helpful… I don’t THINK I’m on the spectrum but I do identify with quite a few of the things that people on the spectrum. I just have no idea what counts as aspie/non-aspie. For example with some friends, the more normal ones, I find it difficult to keep up and it takes me a while to catch up, but with the ‘weird’ friends (especially from school) it’s a lot easier. I’ve never really before thought I had problems with interaction though, and not getting sarcasm as much is a recent thing. And I have noticed recently that I hear quite a lot, but it doesn’t cause me much stress unless I’m stressed out anyway. None of it causes me massive problems but I’m still interested to know. I enjoy finding out things about myself, I’m a massive quiz taker lol
I think that the reason I’ve started noticing these things is because my boyfriend is autistic and so I’ve been looking out for this kind of stuff a lot more. I didn’t really know anything about autism before he came along. But then again, we’re like chalk and cheese. He’s so different to me it almost seems impossible that I could even be a little way onto the spectrum! Aaaah it’s all so confusing…
tl;dr I’m contradictory and I have no idea whether I could be on the spectrum or not. It doesn’t matter hugely but still… I guess I like categorising myself
also here’s my 2nd test result, in case you’re wondering. [img]http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12e.php?p1=66&p2=57&p3=77&p4=30&p5=46&p6=54&p7=35&p8=25&p9=51&p10=39&p11=64&p12=0[/img]
I was about the same on both. But, there are weird things where I didn’t know how to answer. There are a lot of skills I’ve taught myself over the years. If I had taken this quiz a decade ago, I wouldn’t have scored as high on the neurotypical scale I think.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 107 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 113 of 200
You seem to have both neurodiverse and neurotypical traits
But in the pdf it says:
Diagnostic relation
A high score is related to AS and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Your group score: 7.7 of 10 (above average).
. . .I finally took the version 3 . . . my lines again all on the Aspie side – uh -‘scuse me, ‘Neuro-diverse’ which seems an indefintive, ambiguious,vague word, as are MOST of the questions which has been mentioned in almost every comment here.
I agree; the questions needed to be more specific, and/or have additional explaination. Even if this required adding more questions
Also – if some of these questions are asked are ‘biased’ . . . to quote an ex. by Leif Ekblad
December 25, 2014 at 5:27 am;
“Additionally, here question 116 about compulsive sexual behavior is biased towards male neurodiverse people”
Biased questions raise even more doubts and questions about the whole thing.
I know from definitve personal experience, I am more logical thinking than even some men, a trait which is commonly assigned to men, while women are (on average) more ‘given’ to emotion.
I should think two things would be obvious & necessary with regard to any degree of ALL Asperger’s, NT,NTD, ASD etc etc etc tests:
1. Tests should be largely created, or have credulous input by someone on the spectrum, preferably completely neurodiverse. If that were the case, the vagurey would cease. Therefore . . .
2. NO questions would be biased in any way.
btw – I scored again all on the ‘aspie’ side – my lines look rather similar half of an eight sided star.
… lol … upon retrospect, I realize my comments sounded sardonic and were incomplete (tendency to type slower than mental processes)
ANY-way …one of my points not clarified about biased questions personality traits is this:
If some women on the spectrum are extremely logical in their thought process, and if there are questions biased towards men – how does that affect scoring for women – which led to my greater point: how can ANY biased questions result in an accurate score for either gender …??
I just uploaded a major revision of Aspie Quiz. It now has only 10 groups / categories, and basically the contact and relationship groups have been collapsed into a single group (there are other differences too, but this is the major one). The neurotypical relationship group now contains several non-sexual issues with high relevance, so it should no longer get huge scores by many Aspies. This new grouping was also created with explorative factor analysis which gave both 10 factor and 12 factor solutions, but the 10 factor solution seemed better and more intuitive. After the construction, the factors were checked with confirmative factor analysis and the result was slightly worse than before, but with fewer items and more diversity. Aspie Quiz now only has 116 items, 4 controls and currently 1-2 experimental issues.
And I am quite excited to go retake it! For I am a test junkie. =)
I like how Asperger’s and Autism are a bit separated, that helps me learn the difference between the two. I was amused to see OCD lumped in with Asperger’s. I guess that’s a pretty innate part of us, no?
Good pairing of “have you been catcalled” followed by “are you afraid in safe situations”, because incidents like that do tend to make you gun shy all around.
The question about catcalling is experimental, but quite interesting. I’m planning a paper about how neurodiverse females rate this as much more problematic than NTs.
That would be interesting. And specifically why each feel the way they do! The typical argument is compliment vs. insult and person vs. object, it’d be interesting to see who commonly fell where on any axis. If you intend to post or link to it somewhere on the main RDOS site, I’ll keep an eye out for it.
one trait I notice that is common among aspies is the lack of moderation in volume of speech, often using a very inappropriately loud voice for the occasion, whether conversation in a quite room, speaking extremely loudly and startling/scaring animals and young children, and using overly loud voice in business meetings. I find it as common as the odd gait, and surprised not to see a question about it.
196/200 neurodiverse score
14/200 neurotypical score
First time taking the test. Found blog yesterday from reddit.
I’ve shifted from a very likely Aspie (128/87) to more of a mix (114/96) between neurodiverse and neurotypical. Interesting.
My son is 18 and we always thought he had ADD (he was diagnosed professionally) with a side dish of a very strange sense of humour and a general dislike of people. He did the test today on suggestion of an Aspie that met him recently and the result was ‘you are very likely a neurodiverse aspie” Now we are trying to find out what that actually means and we can’t seem to find any good information on neurodiverse Asperger’s. Do you maybe know where I can find all the information I need?
I think that all that means is – on the autism spectrum. Neurodiverse aspie is not a technical term.
Thank you for getting back to me, i appreciate it
I got 132 on version 4. Likely neurodiverse. There are fewer questions than before in version 3, where I scored a more mixed result. Im normal ish socially. But I have diverse talents and perceptions and prefer my own company. Much of this could be nurture over nature but It cant be argued, one way or another I don’t fit into a norm.
I currently score 27 on the AQ. Above average for a programmer. I scored 19 on that many years ago before I spent time being a programmer. I guess I am neuroplastic.
On the EQ-SQ test I score highly on both axes. It said if I was a male I would have aspergers. However since, I understand this to mean that since my scores are balanced I am not diagnosible, Im simply moderately talented and odd.
Personally Im glad the new test is more decisive on my position as diverse. But disappointed there are fewer Neanderthal specifics. It would be good to see a test version that clearly clarifies Neanderthal skills vs AS spectrum diagnoses.
I guess, or hope, I have a higher proportion of neanderthal genes to provide a talent, but have been lucky to not develop sufficient social phobias to classify me as abnormal. I’d rather have a super-aspie talent though.
Its not possible to provide feedback on the test at the source, I hope you wont mind me doing it here.
Slow moving water is extremely calming more than it is fascinating.
Motorcycle noises dont make me afraid so much as irritated, especially the overtuned ones that want to be noisy.
Many of the questions I strongly aggree/disagree with seem more to be the case when I am stressed rather than calm. I seem to be a part-time Aspie or mild ADHD.
Certainly I am an aspie sympathiser.
But I read a paper recently on the correlations of MBTI and personality disorders, From this I am either I’m an extrovert with an Avoidant disorder and analytical skills (which I relate to more as a description), or I have the personality of an Anti-Social.( which I think I picked up from the programmers).
If that study had included Aspergers or Neuroticism in the study I may be happier with the result.
I still much prefer Naive Neanderthal as a personality type and characteristic though. The rest is a societal disorder. Who is to say that common or typical is a good thing? Not Ayn Rand, that’s for sure. Thanks to her I work hard to get into engineers heaven!.
Thankyou aspiequiz for a more interesting perspective on life.
I don’t think the number of Neanderthal traits have been reduced, rather the reverse. The new relationship traits are not part of ASD diagnoses (but they are certainly linked to ASD), and many of these are real personality-traits. In the talent area, there no longer are many good traits, as most of them have too large correlations with each others, which is why only a few make it as relevant and unique enough. Also, the neurodiverse social traits are also personality traits. Then, of course, the neurotypical traits are preferences of modern humans lacking in Neanderthal.
People that don’t like the Neanderthal connection can just disregard this, and explain the traits in other ways. There is no trait with a 100% certain Neanderthal connection in Aspie Quiz.
I received 186/200 as my neurodiverse (Aspie) score, and 15/200 as my NT score. The test taken was the fourth version.
I was curious about one of the questions regarding a “pleasant tingling sensation in the scalp, neck, or back of the body” in response to auditory stimuli. How common is this amongst people with ASD/Asperger’s? Can anyone direct me to articles or psychology literature that discusses this? It was also a question in an older version of the test, and is something I experience daily (while listening to music I enjoy, mostly).
It’s called “autonomous sensory meridian response” (ASMR), and here is the Wikipedia listing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response
I’ve heard from other Aspies that we’re supposed to be prone to experience ASMR in regards to various sounds. It’s supposed to be with more basic and rhythmic noises, such as whispering, pages turning in a book, the sound of paper tearing, crinkling sounds, nails tapping hard surfaces, and stuff like that. Especially whispering, that’s supposed to be the favorite.
Not me. I may find a sense of companionship in my clock ticking on the wall behind me, but that’s it. No fuzzy feelings come with it. And I really hate whispering. I don’t like the puffs of air on my ears when somebody whispers to me, and I really hate listening to all those puffs into a microphone. Maybe I’m the other side of ASMR? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so it stands to reason that if some people eat that stuff up, then there are those that want to smash it with a hammer. (Mild reference to Emperor’s New Groove.)
Thank you; I intend to read through that Wikipedia entry this evening.
The music to which I listen is indie rock, noise pop/rock, and post-punk that is experimental in nature, and this may be why I only experience the sensation whilst listening to particular sections of particular songs. Echoing and music that sounds like it was recorded in a large room, for instance, frequently causes it. The only other sound that causes it of which I can think right now is the rustling of the leaves of birch trees. They have those small and roundish leaves, and the sound they make when it’s windy is very distinct (for me). Once in a while I’ll get the tingling when I hear that, although not to the same intensity as when listening to music.
I also find it very unpleasant when someone whispers into my ear, although it isn’t about the sound as much as it is the sensation of the person’s breath against my skin there. When someone is using a microphone, they breathe out through their nose, and the microphone picks up the sound, I want to hit the person/run away.
Heehee, same here! Breathing into microphones has the same urges with me.
It’s kinda hard to beat music and nature sounds. I like a recording of the wind sweeping through long grass or other leaves, so long as they’re careful to guard the microphone so it doesn’t sound like somebody sniffing it. Frogs and crickets late at night are one of my favorites.
I don’t think anybody has published anything about ASMR and AS yet, but I suppose somebody might eventually do so. In Aspie Quiz, the item is highly relevant for neurodiversity-state, and have been so in multiple versions, so I have no doubt it has a neurodiversity connection.
Obviously it hasn’t anything to do with “meridians” (being that they don’t exist), and prior to the Aspie Quiz I had never seen anything discussing it. However, I’ve experienced it while listening to sounds I enjoy for as long as I’m able to remember, and when I noticed it was on two versions of the quiz I thought perhaps it was a distinct phenomenon for those with AS/ASD (although it seems it isn’t completely limited to these individuals). The Wikipedia page likens it to synaesthesia: for a long period of time there’s no evidence to support it, until someone devises a method of objective measurement. No method has yet been devised and so all information is thus far anecdotal.
There are also those who claim it cures insomnia, anxiety, etc., however there’s no evidence to support these claims. I definitely find it calming whenever I experience it, but I’m very hesitant to believe anyone claiming to be an “expert in ASMR”, as in a few articles one finds if one googles it. It would be nice if the above mentioned objective measurement method could be devised before alternative medicine people (i.e. woo-peddlers) reduced all credibility of the current anecdotes.
I just took this (version four, though) and my score was 187 neurodiverse, 22 neurotypical. Eep. I’ve only very recently started coming to terms with the fact that I’m definitely not neurotypical, and I’m half terrified and half really excited. I feel like there’s a place for me now, that I’m not just a weirdo with strange habits and wants. (I’m a 23 yo female, by the way, so self dx is probably all I’m going to get)
Dian x
So strange. I’m reading through my results (version 4), particularly the third part where it assesses perception. I have all kinds of difficulty with timing in conversation and reading faces, but when it comes to physical objects and dynamics, that’s actually my own little area of genius, so I think my test results are skewed. (I scored 138AS/73NT.) I am hyperaware of my physical environment, and I hyperfocus in it, and this is my area of strength, my “superpower” if that’s what you want to call it.
I have a nearly infallible sense of direction, and read and interprets maps intuitively. My navigation skills are excellent. I do not know anybody with a better sense of direction than mine, or anyone who is a better driver. (In contrast to Rain Man, I really am an excellent driver. I am a professional driver, and I have had hundreds or maybe thousands of passengers by now who have told me how comfortable they feel riding with me, lamenting experiences they’ve had with other drivers. And in a group of friends or family or classmates, I’m typically the one person everyone else in the group can agree upon to let drive. I’m not bragging, I’m being honest. ) One question in the quiz asks about difficulties judging distance, depth, and speed. I have no difficulty there. In fact that’s part of what makes me a better driver than most, because I’m always aware and anticipating how my surroundings are changing, without putting any real effort into it. I’m aware of how fast other vehicles are moving, and how to move among them to avoid getting block in, slowed down, etc. They taught us in training to think 12 seconds ahead. I’ve noticed I think up to 20 or 30 seconds ahead without even trying. Far ahead of any other drivers I work with, and that often leads to my frustration as to why they are not better at their jobs. I have a sense of how things are converging and diverging, and what I need to do respond to position myself where I want to be: speed up just a little, slide in here, etc. It’s just how my mind works.
Another question on the quiz asks about difficulty reading clocks. I could read a clock as young as I could read a book, which in both cases was before I started kindergarten. I was pretty much self-taught, picked it up as my parents read to me. I also taught myself to learn to ride a bike, the summer I turned five. Nobody helped me. I was just always fascinated with bicycles and played at it until one day I didn’t fall by the swings anymore, I kept going all the way across the backyard to the shed. Anyway, clocks. My mind is extremely spatial. I don’t even need numbers on clocks, although lines help for precision, but for the most part I read clocks spatially, and actually tend to translate digital clocks into analog without realizing it. The numbers just get in the way of my sense of what time it is.
Another example of my physical awareness. If I’m sitting in a car with someone, and we’re talking, and the heat or AC has finally kicked in and reaches an uncomfortable level, my attention naturally drifts over to the heat situation and away from the conversation. I will reach over, turn the heat down and adjust the fan so it’s where it needs to be to stay comfortable, then apologize and ask the person to repeat what they just said. I am always aware of the temperature, the movement of air in the room, the lighting, etc.
Another questions asks about one’s sense of how much pressure to apply when doing things with one’s hands. Is this supposed to be an aspie weakness? Physical sensitivity is my strength, not my weakness. I get frustrated when other people who are not remotely physically aware (such as my mother and my aunts) goof stuff up like that. Seriously. My aunt is the sloppiest cake cutter in the world. She completely butchers a dessert before landing it on your plate in unrecognizable form. Makes me crazy. I’m extremely careful with physical objects. I take care of my possessions and people think my things are much newer than they are.
Sorry so long. I’m just at the early stages of thinking through things and writing things out helps.
I am incredibly frustrated by the lack of answers these tests give me. This test I was 108 neuro diverse and 102 neurotypical. The last time I took it the results were similar. On the other test my score was 26. Definitely below the average of 32 but also above what is usual for a neurotypical female. When I read blogs and personal stories by aspies I connect so much and I feel like I finally found myself. The more I think about it the more I find things that fit. On the other hand sometimes I feel like I don’t fit because I can do some things passably well especially when I’m feeling well. I feel like I can be a walking contradiction. I’m incredibly empathic and take on other people’s emotions but at the same time I can be completely oblivious. I’m seen as “smart” or “gifted” in a few subjects and I can understand many thing more quickly than average people around me but at the same time I feel like in some ways my brain works slower than other people. I believe that when people are talking to me, especially if I’m not feeling comfortable, that I take a few seconds longer to process what they say and then a few more seconds to find words to reply. Especially when I try to talk about feelings it is almost impossible for me to find words. If someone is looking at me it becomes even worse.I can focus on things extremely well if I’m interested and I get accused of being obsessed sometimes but at the same time I get distracted very easily. My memory is very good sometimes and other times things completely vanish from my mind.
I am really frustrated and trying to find answers. I’m scared that I’m not really autistic and that whatever i’s going wrong with my brain is just in my imagination. I want a clear answer and I want help but I’m scared of asking for help and I worry that I won’t like the answers I get. I don’t know who to talk to or what to do. I wish these tests would tell me one way or the other what is going on with me.
Sorry for my rant.
Lil
I think that the problem with these tests is that it all depends on how you answer the question – I know that sounds obvious but if you (me / we) are answering the question as you understand it but in a different way to how the person that thought it up actually meant it then you’ll get a different answer than if you were asking the intended question. Not sure if that makes sense. But I know that when I answer them then my answers often begin ‘it depends’. Autistic souls are supposed to prefer non-fiction to fiction apparently but, while I enjoy non-fiction because it gives me facts and knowledge, I also love some fiction. But not necessarily for the same reason as a non-autist. For me it’s escapism and also an opportunity where, in my head, I can be the hero or the person that gets it all right and is successful in some way. I can put myself into the book and have a happy ending. I like crime fiction because I’m interested in that field and because it’s like a jigsaw puzzle; the detective / police etc. have to put the clues together to reveal the picture of whodunnit at the end.And I like children’s fiction because the plots are more straight-forward – there can be a set pattern and you know (usually) at the end it will all come right (well it does in Enid Blyton!). I don’t have the problem with trying to work out all the social nuances that baffle me, it’s just logical and that’s good.
Don’t believe the hype that you can’t be empathetic if you’re on the spectrum. You can feel empathy, you just might struggle to recognise what you need to feel it about or to express it once you’ve realised someone has a problem. You can actually feel way too much empathy in some situations, I do. It’s that whole autistic all or nothing thing again sometimes. And I try to do or say the right thing because I recognise (sometimes) that it’s appropriate, but I might not get it right, and that not getting it right is the autism.
Do you get distracted easily when you’re doing something that you’re really interested in or just when you’re doing something else? If I’m doing something that I’m not that excited about then I can have the attention span of a forgetful goldfish but if I’m reading a good book then I’m away with the fairies. Or if I’m splurging a reply on here when I’m supposed to be writing a dissertation!! I can remember the tiniest most trivial things from years ago in great detail but if I’m learning Latin vocabulary (a passion of mine) and don’t get a mental picture of a word then I can have forgotten it ten seconds later.
My advice – get a copy of ‘I think I might be autistic’ by the rather fantastic Cynthia Kim and read through it slowly. Think about the questions and jot down what occurs to you (because if you want to go get assessed for a diagnosis then it’s miles easier to have written notes than to have to try and remember). You may well find that by the end of the book you have few doubts left! And think about going for a formal diagnosis. It’s not for everyone but it might just leave you in a more stable place. Best of luck whatever you do!
Thank you so much for your response! I was worried noone would answer.
I agree that test questions can be very ambiguous. I wasn’t sure how to interpret some of them and others I wasn’t really sure if they were true because I wasn’t sure if I did some of the things or not. It is also hard to define what defines how often often really means. Do I have to do things every day, or is once a month still often? Most questions I would have to answer with a qualifier. It depends on the situation, how I feel, who the people involved are… If they ask if I’m good at small talk I would say yes, after working in customer service for a couple years I am decent at small talk in the right situations. Before that I just barely able to have a conversation with strangers that didn’t involve them asking me questions and me giving very short answers. I also worry that the more I research Autism that I might subconciously be changing the results to “make myself autistic”.
I also noticed that I have become more aware of some of my traits after reading this blog and other websites. I notice things about myself that I thought were completely normal or that I didn’t even notice. I frequently find myself reading this blog thinking “doesn’t everyone do this?”
I also love fiction. As soon as I learned to read I started spending most of my time reading. When I was lost in a book it was very hard for my parents to tear me away. At first I read everything no matter if it was particularly interesting or not. I spent breakfasts reading cereal boxes instead of talking to the people around me. Now I still love reading but I don’t do it as often any more. I love getting lost in imaginary worlds, but I tend to dislike many of the typical adult real world books out there. They tend to be boring to me. I like fantasy and some science fiction best.
I am really not sure about how good my empathy really is. In my mind I can sometimes understand what a stranger is feeling, but then again I never really double check to see if it is right.
I can be very sensitive when it comes to the mood in a room. If every one around me is grumpy or mad it stresses me out alot and I can become moody. If everyone is happy and enthusiastic it tends to rub off on me even if before that I was in a very bad mood.
I do have a very hard time expressing my feelings. I tend to try to keep them inside. When I do talk about them to someone and they put on their “worried face” or their “concerned voice” I automatically cry, even if it really isn’t anything major. I could be expressing that I”m really hungry or mildly stressed and I will still cry. This of course makes it worse because then the other person will assume that whatever it is is really serious or that I’m overly sensitive and need help in a way that I don’t want.
When I’m really absorbed in something I don’t really tend to get distracted. I will continue working on it even if I get really hungry or if there is something going on around me. I have a very hard time concentrating on anything if there is a tv or something similar playing in the background. I believe it is because I grew up without a tv so I’m not used to it. Even ads can distract me and they are in no way interesting to me. My girlfriend sometimes gets mad at me because I zone out in the middle of a conversation and don’t hear what she says. It is very frustrating to me because the conversation is much more important to me than the tv and I really want to listen to her but it is very difficult to pay attention. When I was a child I used to be the same way with writing. If there was anything written in front of me I would get distracted by that and not focus on conversations I was having. My memory can be both very good and very bad. I can remember random details from a very long time ago but I can forget similar details that were more recent. I haven’t really seen a connection between what I remember and what I forget. Sometimes memories can be buried and after a long time something random can remind me. After that the memory is more near the surface and can be found more easily. I believe all my memories are connected in my brain in some kind of giant web and I have to go through the right connections to find the memories. Some memories are not connected very well and others have strong connections to many other memories so they pop up more frequently. Some memories are especially strong because I frequently mention them in imaginary conversations in my head. A few years ago was the first time I ever had a chance to use one of these practiced conversations out loud. It was a fascinating experience but I was a little disappointed because the other person never replies the way I expect.
I read all the posts that the “I think I might be autistic” is based on but I haven’t gotten the book yet. On those and other posts on here I recognized myself so many times, but other times I didn’t or wasn’t sure. I wish I had taken notes like you recommended. Maybe I will going forward. I was incredibly tempted to make a spreadsheet of myself comparing what parts of me fit into me being autistic and what parts contradict it or are more neutral. I was going to do it but my girlfriend said I was obsessed with autism and said that it is unhealthy to be that obsessed with a disease I may or may not have. She always seems somewhat upset when I mention it or when she sees me reading about it so I’ve tried not to research it in front of her. It makes me very sad because when I become “obsessed” with something then it tends to calm me down and soothe my brain when I research it and it is difficult to ignore.
My girlfriend said that if I think I have autism I should just get diagnosed and then she will believe and support me. I am worried about getting diagnosed partially because I have read about how difficult it can be for a female to be diagnosed with it and partially because I get really uncomfortable talking to doctors. I’m also not really sure what good, other than peace of mind, a diagnosis will bring me. I have already started to improve myself based on strategies for autistic people I’ve seen online. From what I’ve read things I see on this blog to help with anxiety etc is probably more accurate than what a typical doctor would do. I don’t really have an incredibly hard time on my own, I just tend to have difficulties with procrastination and it would halp me to improve my social skills so that I can tell which people really have my best interest at heart and which people are lying t help themselves. People tend to be really overdramatic with their weird social games.
Again thank you very much for your response! I am still searching myself and I am greatful that you have helped me with that.
Lil
You sound like me 🙂 For what it’s worth I don’t think that researching autism will make you subconsciously skew your results – more that it will make you more ‘honest’; you’ll consciously remember things that are relevant that you take for granted and don’t notice.
Anyhow, I could start waffling again but I won’t – I’ll just wish you luck on your journey.
Not 100% sure it’s worth commenting as this post is long dead, but hey. I was doing the quiz with my gf today (I’ve just self-diagnosed, I was 173 ND and 69 NT, with my NT traits being almost exclusively the relationship questions). I asked her to take it because I recognised a lot of the traits I have in her – she scored similarly on both, I think it was about 120 ND and 95 NT, which is roughly where I would have expected.
I did notice a bit of a gender/ sexuality bias in one of the questions. When asked whether she ever realises after the fact that someone was flirting with her, she said no. She’s bisexual, so I gently prompted her by asking whether she’d ever realised afterwards that a girl had been flirting with her. She immediately said ‘yes!’. This makes perfect sense to me, because when men flirt with women it is usually quite overt and hard to ignore. Women (particularly those who are acting against societal expectations of heterosexuality which could possibly lead to abuse if they mistake interest) tend to be much more subtle I think. So this implies to me that heterosexual women are much less likely to have had this ‘missed opportunity’ experience compared to heterosexual or bisexual men, and bisexual or lesbian women.