Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Nordic Psychology has a number of really interesting articles to be read during the wonderful Nordic spring. The articles cover important and interesting themes like personal therapy, eating disorders, interview quality, Hong Psychological Reactance Scale and job embeddedness. In the first article in this issue “Personal therapy and the personal therapist” Fredrik Moe and Jens Thimm summarized the theoretical and empirical literature on personal therapy and its effects on the professional development of therapists and on patient treatment. In a systematic review of the literature, the article demonstrated a convergence between reported benefits from personal therapy and therapist qualities. Furthermore, the articled showed that psychotherapists have rationales (e.g., improvement of emotional and mental functioning and a better understanding of the dynamics between therapist and patient) for attending personal therapy, and self-report studies indicated that they experience benefits related to the important characteristics of effective therapists (e.g., empathy, genuineness, formation of a working alliance). Studies of personal therapy and therapist development found no causal connection or correlation with or effects on patient treatment. In the second article in this issue “«In Solitude is Safeness»: a Patient Perspective on Eating Disorders in the Context of Multiple Childhood Trauma” Malin Olofsson, Hanne Oddli, KariAnne Vrabel and Asle Hoffart described variation and common features in the lived experiences of eating disorders patients with childhood physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse and neglect. Semi-structured interviews were conducted post-treatment with nine participants aged 25-59. The results showed eating disorders onset was described as related to the failure of parental figures and their functions, whereas eating disorders maintenance related to the highly isolative and self-perpetuating nature of the disorder. Furthermore, four master themes emerged across eating disorders and trauma categories: 1) Shape and weight as regulators of closeness and distance, 2) eating disorders as a sanctuary for counteracting feelings of helplessness and incompetence, 3) eating disorders as a designated caregiver, and 4) eating disorders filling an existential emptiness while emptying unwanted emotions. In third article in this issue “Transfer of Simulated Interview Training Effects into Interviews with Children Exposed to a Mock Event” Francesco Pompedda, Annegrete Palu, Kristjan Kask, Karolyn Schiff, Anna Soveri, Jan Antfolk and Pekka Santtila studied if repeated feedback in interviews improve the quality of the interviews. In the study, 40 psychologists were trained (Study I) and 69 psychology students (Study II). In both studies, half of the participants received no feedback (control group) while the other half received feedback (experimental group) on their performance during repeated interviews with avatars. The analyses of transfer effects showed that, compared to controls, interview quality was better in the experimental group. Although the two studies did not show statistically significant training effects for all investigated variables, the article concluded that interview quality can be improved using avatar training and that there is transfer into actual interviews with children. In the fourth article in this issue “The factorial structure of the Hong Psychological Reactance Scale in two Finnish samples” Otto Waris, Linda Karlsson; Jan Antfolk, Linnea Karlsson, Hasse Karlsson and Anna Soveri question the interpretability and usefulness of the Hong Psychological Reactance Scale as a measure of trait reactance. In a two-part study,