ABSTRACT
F. Meloni, S. Federici, A. Stella, C. Mazzeschi, B. Cordella, F. Greco, and M. Grasso
Psychology itself is dead. Or, to put it another way, psychology is in a funny situation. My college, Dartmouth, is constructing a magnificent new building for psychology. Yet its four stories go like this: The basement is all neuroscience. The first floor is devoted to classrooms and administration. The second floor houses social psychology, the third floor, cognitive science, and the fourth, cognitive neuroscience. Why is it called the psychology building? (Gazzaniga 1998, pp. xi-xii)
CONTENTS
8.1 The Languishing Psychologist’s Role in Assistive Technology Assessment ............ 149 8.2 Nothing about “Psycho” without Psychologists: The ICF and the Need for Its
Revision ............................................................................................................................... 151 8.3 The Personal Factors of Functioning and Disability .................................................... 153 8.4 Personal Factors and Assistive Solutions ....................................................................... 154 8.5 The Psychologist in a Center for Technical Aid: The Specialist in Personal Factors ...155 8.6 Outlining the Psychologist’s Role in the ATA Process ................................................. 157
8.6.1 When the Psychologist Role in the ATA Process Is Required ......................... 158 8.6.2 How a Psychologist Facilitates the Awareness of the User/Client’s
Context and Multidisciplinary Team Perspectives ........................................... 160 8.6.2.1 Methodology ............................................................................................ 160 8.6.2.2 Goals ......................................................................................................... 163 8.6.2.3 What a Psychologist Should Do in Promoting a User/Client
Request ..................................................................................................... 164 8.7 Psychologist “Know Thyself”: Psychologist and Professional’s Representations
of the Disabled Users/Clients and Assistive Technologies ......................................... 164 8.7.1 Professionals’ Representation of Disability ....................................................... 165 8.7.2 New Approach in Psychological Practice ........................................................... 168 8.7.3 Psychological Professional Practice Guidelines in the ATA Process.............. 168
8.7.3.1 The User.................................................................................................... 169 8.7.3.2 The Family ............................................................................................... 169 8.7.3.3 The Professionals’ Multidisciplinary Team ........................................ 170
8.8 Conclusions ......................................................................................................................... 170 Summary of the Chapter ............................................................................................................ 172 Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... 172 References ..................................................................................................................................... 172
Together with the neuroscientist Gazzaniga, we ask why is the model called the bio-psychosocial model, one of the classifications of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF; WHO 2001), when it contains nothing psychological? We do not believe that psychology has ended, but surely (clinical) psychologists risk not finding its location if the World Health Organization’s disability model does not build a “floor” for psychology. Maybe it would not be so bad if the problem were just circumscribed to the (clinical) psychologists’ occupation in the world. It is very bad if psychology perhaps has the tools to prevent the abandonment of assistive technology (AT) (Philips and Zhao 1993; Zimmer and Chappell 1999; Riemer-Reiss and Wacker 2000; Lenker and Paquet 2004; Scherer et al. 2005; Verza et al. 2006; Waldron and Layton 2008; Söderström and Ytterhus 2010), to guarantee an AT assessment (ATA) “user-driven process through which the selection of one or more technological aids for an assistive solution is facilitated by the comprehensive utilization of clinical measures, functional analysis, and psycho-socio-environmental evaluations that address, in a specific context of use, the personal well-being of the user through the best matching of user/client and assistive solution.” (see Conclusions, Section I this volume.)
Searching “psychologist role” and “disab*” or “rehabil*” in the “abstract” field of the main databases of the scientific indexes, such as Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), PubMed, Medline, PsyArticle, PsyInfo, Eric, and Ebsco, from 1900 to date, the findings are astonishing: 56 products between 1973 and 2010. By eliminating studies referring to school psychologists or related only marginally to the (clinical) psychologist’s role in rehabilitation and AT assignation, the number of products is reduced to 36, comprising eight chapters in books and monographs and 28 journal articles. Twenty-three of them were published in the 26 years between 1973 and 1999, and the remaining 13 were published in the last 11 years. We found just two conference papers (Mitani et al. 2007; Nihei et al. 2007) in the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE) conference proceedings by searching “psycholog*” in the title or in the abstract.
