The unfolding of psychological distress following the October 7 attack on Israel: The impact of exposure, gender, and event centrality.

Background: Mass disasters, whether natural or human-made, pose significant public health challenges, with some individuals demonstrating resilience, whereas others experience persistent emotional distress that may meet diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders. We explored key risk factors for distress following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, focusing on trauma exposure, gender, and event centrality.

Method: A longitudinal study design was used, assessing posttraumatic distress (PTSD), depression, generalized anxiety, event centrality, and functioning at approximately three (T1; n=858) and seven (T2, n=509) months post-attack.

The reach of reactivation: Effects of consciously-triggered versus unconsciously-triggered reactivation of associative memory.

Newly formed memories are not passively stored for future retrieval; rather, they are reactivated offline and thereby strengthened and transformed. However, reactivation is not a uniform process: it occurs throughout different states of consciousness, including conscious rehearsal during wakefulness and unconscious processing during both wakefulness and sleep. In this study, we explore the consequences of reactivation during conscious and unconscious awake states.

Memory consolidation during sleep involves context reinstatement in humans.

New memories are not quarantined from each other when first encoded; rather, they are interlinked with memories that were encoded in temporal proximity or that share semantic features. By selectively biasing memory processing during sleep, here we test whether context influences sleep consolidation. Participants first formed 18 idiosyncratic narratives, each linking four objects together.