What it measures
How much you hide or compensate for autistic traits in social situations: learned strategies, masking of face and body, and the feeling of performing. Twenty-five statements, three subscales. For adults, including adults without a diagnosis who recognise the pattern.
How a result is read
Hull et al. (2019) report scores as mean item scores on the 1-7 metric, not sums: total 4.79 for the autistic sample (N = 200) and lower for the non-autistic sample (N = 202). The norms library holds no CAT-Q norm cell, so your score is shown as a mean item score against the scale’s midpoint of 4 and the authors’ autistic-sample mean. There is no diagnostic cut-off; the widely quoted total of 100 is not from the authors.
Your score is read against adults generally. The bands below come from the shape of a normal distribution, which is the model the scoring assumes rather than a count from a reference sample. Most people sit in the middle and both ends are rare by definition, so a band is a position in a distribution, not a verdict.
Good uses
- Putting words to the effort social situations cost you.
- Preparing for a conversation with a clinician.
- Seeing which of the three strategies you rely on most.
Known limits
- It measures camouflaging, not autism; a high score is not a diagnosis and a low one does not rule one out.
- It relies on your own insight into what you do in social situations.
Before you start
This result is not a diagnosis. The questionnaire counts how often you have noticed certain experiences recently; it cannot tell why they are there or what they mean for you. Only a qualified clinician can do that, in a conversation that takes your history and your situation into account. A high score is a reason to talk to someone; a low score does not rule anything out if you are struggling.
If you are in Montenegro and need help now: call 124 for emergency medical help or 112 for any emergency, or go to the nearest emergency department (hitna pomoć). Outside Montenegro, contact your local emergency number or crisis line.
Other tests
Covering similar ground: Depression Screener (PHQ-9), Depression Screener (PHQ-8), Two-Question Depression Check (PHQ-2), Four-Question Anxiety and Depression Check (PHQ-4).
Where these come from
Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q). Hull, L., Mandy, W., Lai, M.-C., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Petrides, K. V. (2019). Development and validation of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(3), 819-833. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3792-6 (CC BY 4.0). Montenegrin translation prepared by the Center for Psychology in 2026; the translation is a change to the original work.