Prof. Yael Lahav - Head of lab

Biography:

Prof. Yael Lahav is a licensed clinical psychologist and an associate professor in the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Professor Lahav is a trauma researcher specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and interpersonal victimization. Her research focuses on the psychological processes that shape trauma survivors’ perceptions of themselves, others, and abusive experiences, as well as the implications of these processes for psychopathology, revictimization, and post-traumatic adaptation.

​

A central contribution of her work is in the area of Identification With the Aggressor (IWA), including the development of the Identification With the Aggressor Scale (IAS), which has advanced the empirical study of traumatic bonding and dissociative survival responses. Her findings demonstrate associations between IWA and a range of clinical outcomes, including revictimization, self-harm, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and complex PTSD (CPTSD).

She also developed the Doubt Regarding Abuse-Related Appraisals (DARA) framework and the Abuse Doubt Scale (ADS), which examine survivors’ difficulties in forming confident appraisals regarding abusive experiences.

​

Her broader research program adopts a dissociation-informed perspective on trauma adaptation, including the multifaceted nature of post-traumatic growth and its implications for psychological functioning. Her work is published in leading journals in trauma, dissociation, and clinical psychology, and aims to advance both scientific and clinical understanding of complex trauma and its long-term effects.

​

​

​​

.