Awareness of interpersonal relationships by adolescents with different levels of intellectual development as a factor of their communicative competence

Awareness of interpersonal relationships is one of the most important tasks of personal development for adolescents with intellectual disabilities. Future well-being and communicative success depends to a large extent on the success of this task. Results of a study on the perception of interpersonal relationships by adolescents with mental retardation and mild mental deficiency using a modified sociometric technique according to the author's modified method are presented in this article. Qualitative groups of adolescents with different variations in the awareness of interpersonal relationships are characterized. The results of the study showed that the ability to perceive attitudes is predetermined by the intellectual characteristics of individuals, and their self-assessment of interpersonal relation-ships may be associated with communicative activity, a real level of communicative success, or may be hypercompensatingly over- or underestimated affectively. Adolescents' partially formed and unformed awareness of interpersonal relationships can be compensated by means of psychocorrective intervention, individual sessions with a psychologist aimed at teaching understanding of communication partners, differentiating communication situations, and forming the ability to determine the model of behavior appropriate to the specific communicative situation