City Research Online

Abstract

Camouflaging is an impression management strategy employed by some autistic people, widely seen as a response to the pervasive stigma surrounding autism in society. Autistic narratives and lived experiences consistently link camouflaging to anxiety, depression, suicide risks, and autistic burnout. Quantitative research is yet to determine the nature of these relationships, with a significant portion of recent studies providing inconsistent evidence. While camouflaging can be a compelled survival strategy in social environments, it might also contribute to positive outcomes such as securing employment and forming positive social relationships, implicating a complex interrelationship with mental health and wellbeing. We advocate for using a transactional impression management framework to understand camouflaging and wellbeing and address the inconsistencies in research. Through examining the transactions among a person's individual and cognitive characteristics, behavior modification strategies, and the particular social contexts they find themselves in, this framework guides new empirical research directions to delineate the relationships between camouflaging, impression management, mental health, and wellbeing. There is a need to develop multiple measures of camouflaging that delineate the motivations, ability, effortfulness, and perceived effectiveness of camouflaging and examine how a person's social behaviors are perceived in different social environments. Research should also focus on intersectionality, sociocultural influences, and diverse autistic voices to study context‐sensitive camouflaging experiences across the autistic population.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	autism, camouflaging, impression management, mental health, stigma, wellbeing
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Nursing & Midwifery
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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