“…It should be noted that, in the last decades, research in the field of ASD stressed the need to not limit the investigation to full-blown clinical forms, but to also evaluate those milder, sub-clinical manifestations of the autism spectrum which seem to be distributed along a continuum from the general to the clinical population [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ]. Sub-threshold autistic traits were first investigated among first-degree relatives of ASD patients, where they are known under the name of “broad autism phenotype” [ 14 , 15 ]. However, further studies identified other populations at higher risk of showing autistic traits, ranging from students of scientific courses to psychiatric patients with other kinds of disorders [ 3 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ].…”