The associations between self-rated autistic traits, social camouflaging, and mental health outcomes in Taiwanese anime, comics and games (ACG) doujin creators: an exploratory study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Doujin (どうじん) is a Japanese term referring to a circle where people share the same interests, usually something that belongs to the Anime, Comics, and Games (ACG) subculture. Individuals who belong to it and create related works, known as ACG doujin creators, are usually described as socially awkward and at potential risk of isolation. In such a context, they may theoretically exhibit higher autistic traits and manifest camouflaging tendencies, which may consequently be associated with their mental health. Nonetheless, the impact of autistic traits and camouflaging on mental health in this subculture remains significantly underexplored. METHODS: We recruited 183 Taiwanese ACG doujin creators (age ranges from 18 to 41, 146 female and 37 male) via social networking platforms. Participants completed Chinese online surveys assessing socio-demographic information, doujin activities, past psychiatric history, the 35-item Version of Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ-35), Chinese version Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q-Ch), the General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Linear regression analysis was employed to examine the associations between the aforementioned scales. RESULTS: Our findings revealed that among ACG doujin creators, descriptively higher level of AQ-35 and CAT-Q-Ch than previous studies were found. Moreover, we observed a positive association between camouflaging behaviours and most AQ-35 subscales, with the exception of the mindreading subscale. Additionally, we identified that both camouflaging and autistic traits were significantly linked to higher PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores. CONCLUSIONS: Through this study, we gained insight into the distinctive characteristics of autistic traits, camouflaging behaviours, and mental health among Taiwanese ACG doujin creators, as the associations between the factors mentioned above are divergent compared to previous research. This topic demonstrated that camouflaging is also associated with adverse mental health in a subculture group.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".