Evaluation of Psychometric Properties and Inter-test Associations for Three Popular Measures of Social Competence

A number of behavioral tools are used to assess variability in individuals' social functioning. However, it is often unclear what determines the choice of one test over the others. We here asked whether three popular tools – the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001b), the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Rate, & Plumb, 2001a), and the Reading the Mind in the Films Test (RMFT; Golan et al., 2006) – can be treated as interchangeable for social functioning assessment. The RMET and RMFT scores were strongly correlated with each other but did not correlate with the overall AQ scores (although two subscales of the AQ – imagination and communication/mindreading – correlated reasonably well with RMET and RMFT). These results suggest that the AQ is not interchangeable with RMET or RMFT as they appear to tap different aspects of social competence.