Public Health

Dr. Yael Lahav

Trauma and abuse

Dr. Lahav investigates the implications of psychological trauma and focuses on uncovering the mechanisms underlying post-traumatic distress following interpersonal and ongoing traumatic events, such as captivity, domestic violence, as well as sexual, physical, and emotional abuse during childhood. Her interests revolve primarily, around the unique associations between the https://www.tau.ac.il/~yaellah1/ psychological, interpersonal, somatic, physiological, and functional facets of psychological trauma; as well as the interpersonal processes involved in the victim-perpetrator dynamics, known as identification with the aggressor.

Dr. Lahav, PhD, is a faculty member in the Department of Occupational Therapy. Dr. Lahav is a licensed clinical psychologist. She completed her PhD studies at Tel Aviv University, where she studied the longitudinal associations between attachment and perceived health among former-prisoners-of-war of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Southern Denmark, where she studied the link between attachment and dissociation during treatment among childhood sexual abuse survivors and at Stanford University, as a Fulbright grantee, where she studied posttraumatic growth, as well as the phenomenon of identification with the aggressor among childhood sexual abuse survivors.