This issue of Nordic Psychology has a number of really interesting articles to be read during the beautiful and bright Nordic spring. The articles cover important and interesting themes like victims of rape, grief among spouses of brain injury survivors, measurement tools for mentalization, emotion regulation difficulties and identity diffusion, episodic future thinking and the Accuracy of Assessing the Age of Adolescents.
In the first article of this issue “Recorded Withdrawal from the Police Investigation among Victims of Rape: A Mixed Method Approach to Identifying Case Characteristics and Police Documented Reasons” Nina Beck Hansen, Sophie Lykkegaard Ravn and Maj Hansen aimed at enhancing our understanding of the characteristics and causes of recorded victim withdrawal from the police investigation following rape using a mixed-methods approach. The study is based on a sample of rapes reported in a Danish police district. Results showed that stranger assaults and cases with no verbal or physical victim resistance or no forensic examination were significantly associated with an increased likelihood of recorded victim withdrawal. Furthermore, another set of results indicated that victims may withdraw from the investigation for several reasons, for instance due to psychological distress associated with participating in an investigation. The findings underline potential barriers for the cooperation between victims and police in the investigation of rapes and should be used for establishing initiatives toward reducing the risk of victim withdrawal in rape investigations. In the second article of this issue “Ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief among spouses of brain injury survivors” Cecilie Marie Schmidt Thøgersen and Chalotte Glintborg present a phenomenological study that aimed to explore the experience of grief among caregiving partners. Four semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed by a phenomenological descriptive analysis. Results reveal that grief is often a reaction to ambiguous loss and is experienced as disenfranchised. Furthermore, the study indicates that caregivers’ perception of grief and the situation in general were essential to the experience of grief. In the third article of this issue “Validating measurement tools for mentalization, emotion regulation difficulties and identity diffusion among Finnish adolescents” Sami J. Eloranta, Riittakerttu Kaltiala, Nina Lindberg, Matti Kaivosoja and Kirsi Peltonen used confirmatory factor analysis to assess the reliability and construct validity of the Mentalization Questionnaire (MZQ), different versions of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), and the Assessment of Identity Development and Identity Diffusion in Adolescence (AIDA) with data from a general population of Finnish adolescents (N = 360). The results show among other things, that MZQ, the factor structure and validity of the subscales were not confirmed. For DERS, a short version, that did not include the lack of emotional awareness subscale was the most coherent and recommendable version of the measure. For AIDA, the factor structure was confirmed, while the reliability of the AIDA was acceptable, but some of the subscales showed poor convergent and discriminative validity. In the fourth article of this issue “Episodic future thinking in 35-, 47-, and 55-month-old children” Riikka P. Svane, Toril S. Jensen, Tirill F. Hjuler, Trine Sonne, Osman S. Kingo and Peter Krøjgaard examined preschool children’s episodic future thinking. 241 preschool children in three age groups 35-, 47-, and 55-month-olds participated. As expected, the results revealed a developmental progression with the older children outperforming their younger peers. However, the results presented in the article when considered together with other evidence, may suggest a hitherto neglected developmental spurt from around 3.5- to 4-years of age in relation to episodic future thinking, calling for further research in this age range. In the fifth and final article of this issue “How Old Was She? The Accuracy of Assessing the Age of Adolescents’ Based on Photos” Roosa Norja, Linda Karlsson, Jan Antfolk, Thomas Nyman and Julia Korkman investigated the effects of gender, age, and ethnicity of both targets (n = 240) and observers (n = 869) on the accuracy of age estimation. The results show that the participants overestimated the age of the adolescents by, on average, 3.51 years. Participants overestimated the age of young adolescent girls to a greater extent than that of younger boys. Men made larger overestimations than women. Participants also estimated smiling targets as being older than targets with neutral facial expression, and the age of girls with makeup to be older than girls without makeup. The study concludes that the ability of individuals to estimate the age of adolescents is generally low. This might have important legal implications
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