Ziv Ben-Zion, PhD
@zivbenzion
Clinical Neuroscientist 🧠 | Head of Ben-Zion Resilience & Recovery Lab 💪 | Assistant Professor at Haifa University & Yale University 🎓🇮🇱🇺🇸
Are you an early-career researcher in Israel or Germany with a Master’s degree or higher? Interested in mental health, stress, trauma, risk, resilience, or recovery? Join our GIF Young Scientists’ Meeting in Hamburg, Nov 10-12, 2026. Apply (by Aug 21): rc.medicalschool-hamburg.de/surveys/?s=E...
LLMs don’t feel anxiety. But emotionally charged context can still change their behavior. In our new npj Artificial Intelligence paper, anxiety-inducing narratives shifted LLM agents toward less healthy grocery choices across 2,250 shopping runs. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
I don't wear a suit very often... so if you're at #SPR2026 in Osaka, please help justify the decision. 😄 Come join our symposium this afternoon! 🕓4:50-6:05 PM |📍Music Room 3 (or online) @sprofficial.bsky.social @haifaresearch.bsky.social @yale.edu @yalemedicine.bsky.social
Honored to receive the ECNP Rising Star Award 2026! 🏆 Grateful for the recognition of our work on neuroscience, stress & trauma 🧠 Thanks to my mentors, collaborators, friends & family who made this possible 🙏 See you in Munich 🇩🇪 @ecnp.eu @org-ecnp-coa-cns.bsky.social @haifaresearch.bsky.social
Grateful to @biologicalpsych.bsky.social for highlighting our work on fear vs. emotional pain in PTSD, from symptom networks to neural signatures. Open access for 60 days 👇 doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...
Honored to receive the @acnporg.bsky.social Travel Award! Grateful for the support and for the opportunity to share our work and engage with this outstanding scientific community. @haifaresearch.bsky.social @yaleschoolofmed.bsky.social @yale.edu @dpn-journal.bsky.social @npp-journal.bsky.social
1,000 citations! 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ Next stop: understanding the brain 🧠😉🎉
Exciting news! 🎉 I’ve been awarded the ISF Beresheet Grant (~₪7M) to launch the Resilience & Recovery Lab at Haifa University. 🧠 Our STRONG project will examine how people & communities recover from trauma - through surveys, behavioral & fMRI studies - to uncover resilience & guide interventions. 💪
🌟 Exciting news! 🌟 📰 My piece on safeguards for emotionally responsive AI has been accepted in @nature.com! 🥳 I’m deeply honored to contribute to one of the world’s most respected scientific journals. 🙏 It goes live on July 1st, stay tuned! 🗓️ #Nature #AI#LLMs #Ethics #MentalHealth #WorldView
Honored to bring home the 2025 Society of Biological Psychiatry #SOBP Travel Award! 🥳✈️🧠 Toronto’s meeting was a blast. Huge thanks to the SOBP committee, my mentors & collaborators for making this possible. 🙏 @yaleschoolofmed.bsky.social @haifaresearch.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social
Off to the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) Annual Meeting 2025! ✈️🇨🇦🧠
🚀 Just 5 days since publication, our paper is already the #1 trending article on @natureportfolio.nature.com npj Digital Medicine! 🥳 🤖 Check out how we induced anxiety in Chat-GPT using traumatic narratives - then calmed it down with mindfulness & meditation: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📝
3/ But what happens when we introduce relaxation techniques? We prompted Chat-GPT with mindfulness-based exercises commonly used in clinical therapy. 🌿 And it worked! Anxiety levels dropped—though not quite to baseline.
2/ We exposed Chat-GPT-4 to traumatic narratives and assessed its "anxiety" using a validated psychological scale (STAI-s). 📈 The results? Trauma narratives doubled Chat-GPT’s reported anxiety - similar to high anxiety levels in humans!
🚨New Paper Alert! Our latest research in npj Digital Medicine explores two unusual questions: 1⃣ Can Chat-GPT experience state anxiety?💥🤖 2⃣ If so, can we reduce it? 📉 A thread on how we "took Chat-GPT to therapy" 🧵👇 Full text available here: rdcu.be/ebZ9v
No words can explain the pain. Shiri, Kfir & Ariel - kidnapped from their home on Oct 7 & murdered by Hamas monsters in captivity. You will always be in our hearts 💔💔💔
Exciting news! I'm joining Haifa University’s School of Public Health as an Assistant Professor!🥳My lab will study neural mechanisms of stress vulnerability & resilience🧠, a key public health challenge in Israel 🇮🇱. Grateful to all who supported me & excited for what’s ahead!🙏
5️⃣ By incorporating insights from animal studies, we gain a better grasp of how different neural circuits may handle the values of anticipated rewards and punishments separately or together. 🐒🐭 [6/9]
2️⃣ We review the concept of a "common currency" in the brain, where rewards and punishments are encoded on a unified scale. This theory suggests that similar brain regions process both types of outcomes, allowing flexible decision-making & learning across contexts. [3/9]