The Awareness of Social Inference Test – Short (TASIT-S)

Written by Skye McDonald, Sharon Flanagan and Cynthia Honan
From AU$115

The Awareness of Social Inference Test- Short (TASIT-S) developed by Skye McDonald,  Cynthia Honan and colleagues in Australia is suitable to assess social cognition in any population that may experience problems understanding social cues.  This includes Autism Spectrum Disorders and other developmental disorders, schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric conditions, congenital and acquired brain injuries and dementia. TASIT-S is an empirically validated brief version of the full TASIT. TASIT-S assess social cognition using videos of naturalistic everyday conversations in which two actors interact. It has established ecological validity, reliability and construct validity.

Assessment of social cognition typically requires an assessment of the ability to recognise emotions in another person as well as the ability to make theory of mind judgements, that is, understanding what another person is thinking or intending which includes understanding what a speaker intends when they say something indirectly. In TASIT-S social cognition is assessed by asking the participant to point to the correct category or emotion displayed by a speaker (Part 1) or by answering simple yes/no questions as to the feelings, thoughts, intentions of the speakers and the implied meaning of their remarks (Parts 2 and 3). The administration time for Parts 1-3 is approximately 20 minutes. The assessment of social cognitive ability is completed by calculating a range of scores that are easily summated on the summary response sheets.

TASIT-S is one of very few tests of social cognition available with normative data. It has normative data for around 620 Australian speakers (aged 13 to 75+) and 180 adults from the USA. Differences in scores between Australian and USA speakers are minor  which suggests TASIT-S is well tolerated by North Americans.

TASIT-S is suitable to assess social cognition for the purposes of diagnosing difficulties using social cues. Because it uses natural examples of social interactions, it points directly to what kinds of social interactions the client may have difficulty with. In turn, the assessment of social cognition provided by TASIT-S can highlight targets for remediation.

What is in the TASIT-S Kit?
Manual, Social Inference Response Cards, 25 record forms (and printable PDF), USB with videos.

TASIT-S Table of Contents

Frequently Asked Questions

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