Despite the increasing evidence of common neurodevelopmental alterations and high simultaneous or sequential co-occurrence, the relationship between specific cognitive dysfunctions and psychiatric vulnerability has not been adequately studied, not even in people with intellectual developmental disorders (IDD), whose rate of mental health problems is up to 4 times higher than the general population.

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the correlation between specific cognitive dysfunctions or dysfunctional cognitive patterns and the presence of specific psychiatric symptoms and syndromes in people with IDD.

A sample of 52 individuals with IDD consecutively attending a clinical facility for multidisciplinary evaluation, in Florence, Italy was assessed through the SPAID (psychiatric instrument for intellectual disabled adult) system, the WAIS III - R (Wechsler adult intelligence scale III – Revised), the TMT (trial making test), and other neuropsychological tools. Psychiatric diagnoses were formulated by expert clinicians in accordance to DC-LD or DM-ID criteria. The main procedure of the data statistical elaboration was the calculation of frequency and correlation indexes.

Some relevant correlations have been found, that between executive frontal functions, autistic traits and impulse control disorder, and that between working memory and bipolar disorder were among the strongest.

In people with IDD some cognitive alterations or ‘characteristics’ significantly correlate with the presence of psychiatric disorders. The possibility to understand the nature of this relationship seems to increase with the degree of specificity of variables in both the cognitive and the psychopathological assessment.