title: Personality development and intellectual disability.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This review examines the factors that shape personality and how they can inform on the behaviour of people with intellectual disability both to help them function at least at their cognitive level and add a developmental dimension to treatment plans.
  
  
  RESULTS
  People with intellectual disability experience more failure, rejection and social deprivation leading to personality traits that may impede their ability to learn and predispose them to depression. Brain changes due to genetic conditions may be responsible for the behavioural phenotypes, although the autism phenotype is associated with different causes. Schizophrenia has a strong neurodevelopmental component and it could be on a gradient of decreasing neurodevelopmental impairment between intellectual disability and autism on one hand and bipolar disorder on the other.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Understanding how early-life experience and current-life situations give rise to personality traits and taking a developmental perspective, for example, mental age, could clarify the clinical presentation. Developments in molecular genetics and brain imaging may clarify how brain changes lead to personality features. Finally, it may be time to address whether it is still helpful to have categorical diagnoses when there is increasing evidence from genetic studies supporting a continuum of neurodevelopmental disorders.
authors.affiliation: aPsychiatry of Intellectual Disability, Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust, Jaffray Resource Centre, Erdington, Birmingham bNational Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, Headington, Oxford cBirmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust, St Stephens Centre, Handsworth, Birmingham, UK.
authors.forename: Meera
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Roy
authors.forename: Ameeta
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Retzer
authors.forename: Tonye
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sikabofori
mesh_terms: D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000523:psychology*; D009042:Motivation; D010553:Personality Development; D012649:Self Concept