Can Gaslighting Be Unintentional? Intent, Impact, and the Limits of the Label
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 22, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Yes—under some scholarly definitions, gaslighting can occur without a fully conscious, malicious plan. But that is not the same as saying that every accidental hurt, memory error, disagreement, defensive reaction, or invalidating comment is “unintentional gaslighting.” The scientific literature still disagrees about whether conscious intent is a necessary part of the construct. A 2026 historical review found that definitions have shifted over time from overt, deliberate schemes toward subtler patterns whose motives may be partly unconscious, while a recent social-psychological framework still treats an attempt to convince a target that they are epistemically incompetent as a core feature. (Klein et al., 2026a) (Klein et al., 2026b)
The most useful answer is therefore more precise than a simple yes or no: conscious intent is one dimension of gaslighting, not a universally agreed diagnostic criterion. When intent is unclear, the evidence is better evaluated by asking what behavior is occurring, whether it forms a repeated pattern, what exactly is being undermined, what happens when the behavior is corrected or challenged, and whether the pattern is eroding the other person’s confidence in their own perception, memory, judgment, or capacity to know what happened.
Gaslighting is not a mental disorder and “gaslighter” is not a clinical diagnosis. The DSM-5-TR and the ICD-11 Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Requirements classify mental disorders; gaslighting is instead a descriptive construct used across psychology, relationship research, philosophy, sociology, abuse research, and increasingly organizational and healthcare literature. That distinction matters because a behavior pattern can be harmful without telling us that the person engaging in it has any particular personality disorder or psychiatric condition.
The short answer: intent matters, but the literature does not treat it consistently
There is genuine disagreement in the academic literature about intentionality. A 2025 mixed-methods systematic review of gaslighting in gender-based violence explicitly described conscious intent as a debated issue. Some sources in that review allowed gaslighting to occur without self-awareness of the manipulative behavior; others avoided making assumptions about intent and focused on observable tactics and consequences. (Adair, 2025) A 2026 historical review similarly documented a long-term shift toward conceptualizations in which motives can be less conscious and sometimes nonmalicious. (Klein et al., 2026a)
At the same time, broad definitions create a real conceptual problem. If gaslighting is reduced to “something another person said that made me question myself,” ordinary disagreement can be pulled into the category. Philosopher Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini describes this as an overgeneration problem for anti-intentionalist accounts: a definition that is too permissive risks counting normal conflicts about what is true as gaslighting. (Kirk-Giannini, 2025) Contemporary psychological work tries to preserve a narrower center by focusing on epistemic undermining—pressure on a person to distrust their own ability to perceive, remember, interpret, or know—rather than on disagreement alone. (Klein et al., 2026b)
That tension explains why online answers often sound contradictory. Some writers reserve “gaslighting” for deliberate reality manipulation. Others use “unintentional gaslighting” for repeated epistemic undermining that may arise without a consciously formulated strategy. Both usages exist. The scientific task is to specify which definition is being used and avoid smuggling ordinary interpersonal mistakes into an abuse label.
What “unintentional” can mean
The phrase “unintentional gaslighting” hides several different questions. A person can lack one kind of intent while possessing another. Separating these possibilities makes the term far more useful.
1. No conscious plan to destabilize the other person
A person may repeatedly deny, reinterpret, or dismiss another person’s experience without thinking, “I want this person to doubt their own mind.” Some philosophical and interdisciplinary accounts allow this to count as gaslighting when the recurring pattern nevertheless works by attacking the target’s epistemic confidence. Kate Abramson’s influential account explicitly allowed the relevant attempt to occur consciously or otherwise, and the 2026 historical review identifies this as one important turn in the concept’s development. (Abramson, 2014) (Klein et al., 2026a)
2. No malicious motive
A person may understand that they are pushing another person to abandon their interpretation but tell themselves they are doing it for a benign reason: keeping peace, defending the relationship, protecting someone, preventing embarrassment, or avoiding what they regard as an unnecessary conflict. Lack of malice does not establish lack of manipulation. It also does not automatically establish gaslighting. The defining question remains whether the interaction repeatedly targets the other person’s capacity to trust their own perception or judgment.
3. No awareness of the motive
Someone can be aware of the words they are using while having little insight into why they keep using them. Defensive habits can be automatic. A person may reflexively deny events, minimize evidence, or attack the other person’s credibility whenever accountability becomes threatening. Calling this “unintentional” refers to limited self-awareness of the motive or pattern, not to an absence of behavior.
4. A sincere but mistaken belief
This is the category most likely to be mislabeled. Two people can remember the same conversation differently. Memory is reconstructive, attention is selective, and confidence is not a guarantee of accuracy. If one person sincerely says, “That is not how I remember it,” there is a conflict in recollection. The mere fact that the other person feels confused or starts second-guessing themselves does not transform the disagreement into gaslighting.
A sincere mistake can become part of a more troubling pattern if the person moves from defending a memory to systematically discrediting the other person’s capacity to know anything: “You always invent things,” “Your memory is worthless,” “Everyone knows you cannot trust your own mind,” or shifting explanations that repeatedly preserve the speaker’s authority while degrading the other person’s. The relevant shift is from contesting an event to contesting the person’s epistemic competence.
What gaslighting is trying to capture
Modern scholarship increasingly treats gaslighting as an epistemic form of manipulation. “Epistemic” here concerns knowing: how people decide what happened, whether a memory is reliable, whether a perception deserves trust, and whose interpretation of reality is treated as authoritative. In the 2026 social-psychological framework proposed by Willis Klein, Suzanne Wood, and Jennifer Bartz, two core features are an attempt to convince the target that they are epistemically incompetent and the target’s epistemic trust in the person applying that pressure. (Klein et al., 2026b)
That framework helps explain why gaslighting is narrower than manipulation in general. People can manipulate through guilt, reward, threats, flattery, selective disclosure, social pressure, or strategic silence without making the target distrust their own capacity to perceive or know. Gaslighting is distinctive when the target’s relationship to their own reality-testing becomes part of the mechanism.
The evidence base is still developing. The 2026 Clinical Psychology Review article describes relatively few empirical studies compared with the enormous public interest in the term, with much of the evidence historically consisting of case studies and qualitative work. (Klein et al., 2026a) Qualitative research in romantic relationships has nevertheless documented recurring reports of reality denial, accusations that targets were irrational or “crazy,” turning the tables during conflict, and subsequent self-doubt. (Klein, Li, & Wood, 2023) Interviews with intimate-partner-violence survivors have likewise emphasized damage to self-trust and the experience of losing confidence in oneself as a knower. (Hailes & Goodman, 2025)
Intent and impact are different questions
The common formula “intent does not matter, only impact matters” is too simple for this topic. Impact matters enormously for harm, support, and accountability. But impact alone cannot tell us which psychological construct best describes an interaction. Many experiences can produce confusion, self-doubt, anxiety, shame, or mistrust: a painful breakup, inconsistent communication, a mistaken accusation, chronic criticism, invalidation, deception, trauma, or a high-conflict relationship. Those outcomes do not all become gaslighting because they share an effect.
Intent also has limits as a test. Internal motives are difficult to observe, people can misrepresent them, and people are often imperfect reporters of their own motivations. Requiring proof of a secret conscious plan can make a behavioral concept practically unusable. This is why some recent reviews emphasize observable tactics, repetition, power, and outcomes rather than demanding evidence of explicit malicious intent. (Adair, 2025) The strongest approach is to keep both questions visible: What appears to be happening, and what can actually be established about intent?
A five-part way to evaluate a possible pattern
When “Was it intentional?” cannot be answered from the outside, five other dimensions can be examined without pretending to read another person’s mind.
1. Behavior: what is the person actually doing?
Look for observable behavior rather than a personality label. Are they disputing one fact, or repeatedly telling the other person that their perception, memory, reasoning, or emotional interpretation cannot be trusted? Are they changing explanations as evidence appears? Are they introducing false alternatives, denying documented events, or treating ordinary disagreement as proof that the other person is unstable?
2. Pattern: is it repeated and self-reinforcing?
Gaslighting is generally conceptualized as a pattern rather than a single bad sentence. Abramson’s account emphasized multiple incidents over time, and contemporary frameworks describe repeated cycles through which self-trust can erode. (Abramson, 2014) (Klein et al., 2026b) Repetition alone is not enough, but it helps distinguish a stable interpersonal dynamic from a one-off mistake.
3. Epistemic target: what is being undermined?
A central question is whether the dispute is about an event or about the target’s ability to know. “I remember it differently” contests a memory. “You cannot trust your memory; you make things up; your perception is always wrong” contests the person’s competence as a knower. The second pattern is much closer to the construct described in contemporary scholarship.
4. Impact: what happens to the target over time?
Does the person increasingly defer to the other’s account of reality, repeatedly check their own memory, feel unable to trust their judgment, or lose confidence in making decisions? Those effects are consistent with the outcomes described in qualitative gaslighting research, although they are not specific enough to prove gaslighting by themselves. (Klein, Li, & Wood, 2023) (Hailes & Goodman, 2025)
5. Accountability: what happens when uncertainty or evidence is introduced?
The response to correction is often practically informative. A person who says, “I was certain, but the message shows I was wrong; I am sorry,” is doing something importantly different from a person who responds to every disconfirming fact by inventing a new reason the other person cannot be trusted. Accountability does not retroactively prove or disprove the original intent. It does reveal whether the interaction can update in response to reality.
When a memory disagreement is not gaslighting
Memory conflicts are one of the most common places where the label expands too far. Human memory is not a video recording. Two people can encode different details, infer different meanings, or later remember different versions without either person manipulating the other. A disagreement can be frustrating and consequential while remaining a disagreement.
Consider: “I thought we agreed to meet at seven.” “I remember eight.” Both people check the messages and discover the text said 7:30. No one needed to be gaslighting anyone. Even if one person initially said, “No, I’m sure you said eight,” confidence plus error is still error.
Now consider a repeated pattern in which evidence never resolves the dispute. Screenshots are dismissed as fabricated, third-party witnesses are described as confused, and every contradiction becomes new evidence that the target is unstable or incapable of remembering correctly. The concern is no longer just who remembered the event accurately. The interaction is reorganized around discrediting the target’s capacity to know.
Unintentional gaslighting is not a synonym for invalidation
Emotional invalidation occurs when someone dismisses, minimizes, rejects, or fails to recognize another person’s emotional experience. “You should not be upset,” “That is nothing to cry about,” or “You are too sensitive” can be invalidating. They may be cruel, dismissive, or chronically harmful. They do not automatically establish gaslighting.
Gaslighting becomes the more precise label when the interaction goes beyond devaluing an emotion and works to make the person distrust their own perception, memory, judgment, or grasp of reality. An invalidating statement can be used inside a gaslighting pattern, but the constructs are not interchangeable.
Gaslighting is also not the same as lying
A lie is a knowingly false statement. Gaslighting can include lies, but lying and gaslighting answer different questions. Someone can lie to hide an affair, avoid embarrassment, inflate an achievement, or escape a consequence without trying to make another person distrust their own mind. Conversely, some accounts of gaslighting allow the relevant undermining to occur without the actor consciously recognizing that their behavior is manipulative.
The distinction is useful because “Was that statement false?” can sometimes be answered with evidence, while “Was this a gaslighting pattern?” requires a broader analysis of repetition, epistemic undermining, relationship leverage, and effects on self-trust.
Projection, blame shifting, DARVO, guilt tripping, and other tactics are separate constructs
Search language often groups many difficult interpersonal behaviors under “gaslighting,” but conceptual precision matters. Projection attributes one’s own unwanted thoughts, feelings, or motives to someone else. Blame shifting redirects responsibility. Guilt tripping uses guilt as leverage. DARVO refers to a pattern of denying, attacking, and reversing victim and offender roles. Love bombing, triangulation, silent treatment, emotional manipulation, psychological manipulation, and coercive control each have their own mechanisms and boundaries.
Any of these may coexist with gaslighting. None is automatically gaslighting. A tactic becomes relevant to the gaslighting construct when it participates in a pattern that undermines the target’s confidence in their own capacity to know or interpret reality. Contemporary reviews repeatedly warn that inconsistent definitions and conflation with broader manipulation make the construct harder to study. (Darke, Paterson, & van Golde, 2026) (Adair, 2025)
What public perception research adds
A 2025 study by Lillian Darke, Helen Paterson, and Celine van Golde tested public judgments using vignettes that varied repetition, intention, and outcomes in a sample of 595 university students. The study found continuing ambiguity in how people define and recognize gaslighting, even though participants generally recognized it as emotional abuse. (Darke et al., 2025)
That matters for the search question. “Can gaslighting be unintentional?” is partly a scientific question and partly a language question. Public usage has expanded faster than empirical standardization. Search results therefore mix at least three models: gaslighting as deliberate abuse, gaslighting as a possibly unconscious pattern of epistemic manipulation, and “gaslighting” as a broad label for any invalidating interaction. The third usage is the least precise and creates the greatest risk of turning normal conflict into pathology.
Four examples that show where the boundary changes
Example 1: ordinary disagreement
Two partners remember whether a conversation happened before or after dinner. Each is confident. They disagree, then accept that neither can establish the detail. This is a memory disagreement. Confusion is possible; gaslighting is not established.
Example 2: invalidation without reality manipulation
One person says, “I felt embarrassed when you joked about me.” The other replies, “You are being too sensitive.” The response is dismissive and may be emotionally invalidating. By itself, it does not demonstrate an attempt or pattern aimed at making the first person distrust their memory or grasp of reality.
Example 3: repeated epistemic undermining with unclear conscious intent
Whenever a conflict occurs, one person automatically responds, “That never happened,” “You always invent things,” or “Your memory is terrible.” When shown messages that contradict them, they shift to saying the messages have been misunderstood or that the other person is too unstable to interpret them. They may sincerely deny having a plan to manipulate anyone. Under accounts that allow unconscious or implicit gaslighting, this pattern could fit because its repeated operation is to discredit the other person as a reliable knower. Under stricter intentionalist accounts, the unresolved question of purposeful manipulation would remain important.
Example 4: deliberate reality manipulation
A person knowingly changes facts or circumstances, denies the change, and uses the resulting confusion to convince someone that their memory or perception is unreliable. This is closest to the classic model from which the term developed and presents little controversy about intentionality.
Does lack of intent reduce responsibility?
Lack of conscious intent can change how behavior is explained, but it does not erase its effects or remove the need for accountability. People are routinely responsible for changing harmful patterns once those patterns are made visible, even when the habits were not originally planned.
At the same time, accountability should not depend on forcing a contested label. “When we disagree, you repeatedly tell me that my memory is defective and that I am irrational. I will not continue conversations that turn into attacks on my ability to know what happened” is behaviorally specific. It can establish a boundary whether or not both people ever agree on the word gaslighting.
This is especially important because arguments about labels can become circular. If one person says “You are gaslighting me” and the other says “No, I am not,” the debate can shift away from the observable behavior. Describing the pattern, evidence, impact, and requested change often produces more information than trying to infer motive from a single exchange.
What happens after correction is often more informative than what someone claims about intent
People make mistakes. A relationship does not require perfect memory or perfect emotional attunement. What differentiates an ordinary mistake from a persistent reality-undermining dynamic is often the capacity for revision.
A corrective response might sound like: “I remembered that differently, but I can see the record now,” “I should not have said your memory is unreliable,” or “I was defensive and I dismissed what you were telling me.” A concerning pattern is one in which every new piece of evidence is absorbed into a new attack on the other person’s credibility.
This is not a diagnostic test. People can apologize strategically, and defensive people can initially react badly before repairing. The point is narrower: responsiveness to evidence and accountability are observable, whereas another person’s private intent often is not.
Impact matters even when the label remains uncertain
A person does not need a definitive verdict on the word gaslighting before taking recurring confusion or erosion of self-trust seriously. Qualitative studies of people who identify as having experienced gaslighting describe diminished sense of self, mistrust, self-doubt, and disruptions in confidence as a knower. (Klein, Li, & Wood, 2023) (Hailes & Goodman, 2025) These studies are valuable for describing lived experience, while their qualitative and self-selected samples do not establish how often gaslighting occurs in the general population or prove that every similar outcome has the same cause.
The scientific status is therefore asymmetric: evidence that gaslighting-like patterns can be psychologically destabilizing is meaningful, while prevalence estimates, universal mechanisms, clean diagnostic thresholds, and reliable inferences about perpetrator intent remain much less settled. The 2026 historical review explicitly identifies the empirical literature as comparatively sparse and theoretically heterogeneous. (Klein et al., 2026a)
How to respond when you do not know whether it is intentional
When there is no immediate safety concern, it is often more useful to test the interaction than to solve the other person’s motive. Keep the focus on observable events, calibrated uncertainty, and whether the conversation can tolerate evidence. Instead of arguing “You are a gaslighter,” a person might say, “We may remember this differently. I am willing to check the record, but I am not willing to treat a disagreement as proof that I am irrational.”
Independent reality checks can also be useful. Written records, dates, messages, contemporaneous notes, or a trusted third party may clarify facts and reduce the pressure to settle everything through one person’s confidence. Documentation should be used for orientation and practical clarity, not as an endless compulsion to prove every interaction.
A boundary can target the behavior directly: “If the conversation turns into claims that I am crazy, unstable, or incapable of remembering anything, I will end the discussion and return to it later.” Whether that boundary is respected provides practical information about the relationship dynamic.
Communication advice has limits. In a relationship marked by fear, intimidation, surveillance, retaliation, threats, isolation, financial control, stalking, or escalating coercion, the problem is not simply finding a better sentence. Safety planning and support from qualified local domestic-abuse, legal, workplace, healthcare, or emergency resources may be more appropriate than confrontation. Gaslighting can occur inside coercive control, but the two terms are not interchangeable.
If you recognize the behavior in yourself
The useful question is not “Am I secretly a gaslighter?” It is “What do I do when another person’s account conflicts with mine?” A person can reduce epistemically harmful behavior by using uncertainty accurately: “I remember it differently” instead of “That never happened”; “I may be wrong” instead of treating confidence as proof; and “I disagree with your interpretation” instead of “You are irrational for seeing it that way.”
When evidence contradicts your memory, update. When you have attacked someone’s credibility instead of addressing the event, repair that specific harm. When a defensive pattern repeatedly appears around accountability, psychotherapy may help examine the emotions, learned interaction habits, or conflict processes that keep the pattern going. That recommendation does not imply a diagnosis, and the research does not support assigning a particular personality disorder from gaslighting behavior alone.
Can a person gaslight without realizing they are doing it?
Some frameworks say yes. The strongest support for that answer is conceptual rather than a large body of experiments showing an “unconscious gaslighting” mechanism. Historical and systematic reviews document multiple scholarly traditions in which gaslighting can be unconscious, implicit, or defined without requiring proof of conscious intent. (Klein et al., 2026a) (Adair, 2025)
Other contemporary frameworks preserve purposive language. Klein, Wood, and Bartz define a core feature as an attempt to convince the target that they are epistemically incompetent. (Klein et al., 2026b) That word “attempt” matters: it keeps the construct tied to a direction of influence rather than any interaction that happens to make someone doubt themselves. The literature has not yet resolved how much awareness an “attempt” requires.
The best current synthesis is therefore: a person does not necessarily need a consciously malicious master plan for a pattern to be described as gaslighting under some scholarly accounts, but accidental discomfort, invalidation, disagreement, or mistaken memory is not enough. The label becomes more defensible as the pattern repeatedly targets the other person’s epistemic self-trust and resists correction.
Why “unintentional gaslighting” should remain a careful label
The phrase can be useful when it distinguishes conscious strategy from limited self-awareness. It becomes misleading when it turns every interpersonal error into a form of abuse. The boundary matters for both directions: overly narrow definitions can miss harmful patterns that do not come with a confessed plan, while overly broad definitions can pathologize ordinary fallibility and disagreement.
This is not just a semantic concern. A construct that includes everything explains very little. The interdisciplinary literature has repeatedly noted inconsistent operationalization, and the newest psychological framework is an effort to give the concept testable boundaries. (Darke, Paterson, & van Golde, 2026) (Klein et al., 2026b)
The boundary also protects people from an impossible standard of communication. Healthy relationships still contain wrong memories, defensive moments, clumsy wording, emotional invalidation, and genuine disagreement. The relevant question is whether these moments can be corrected or whether the relationship repeatedly reorganizes reality around one person’s authority and the other person’s supposed inability to know.
Scientific limitations
Gaslighting research is expanding rapidly, but the evidence base remains younger and less standardized than the popularity of the term suggests. Definitions vary across psychology, philosophy, sociology, intimate-partner-violence research, organizational research, and healthcare. Many empirical studies are qualitative, rely on retrospective self-report, examine selected populations, or operationalize gaslighting differently. (Klein et al., 2026a) (Darke, Paterson, & van Golde, 2026)
This means several claims should remain provisional: how common gaslighting is in the general population, whether intentional and less-conscious forms have the same mechanisms, which behaviors best discriminate gaslighting from adjacent forms of psychological manipulation, and which interventions specifically reduce gaslighting rather than relationship conflict more broadly.
The evidence is stronger for a narrower conclusion: gaslighting is centrally concerned with undermining a person’s confidence in their own knowing, it usually unfolds as a pattern rather than a single sentence, and the field has not reached consensus that conscious malicious intent is required in every case.
Frequently asked questions
Is gaslighting always intentional?
No single definition has won consensus. Some scholarly accounts allow unconscious or less-aware gaslighting, while other frameworks emphasize an attempt to undermine the target’s epistemic competence. Current reviews explicitly identify intentionality as debated. (Adair, 2025) (Klein et al., 2026a)
Can someone gaslight you if they genuinely believe what they are saying?
Possibly under some anti-intentional or unconscious accounts, but sincere belief alone does not make a disagreement gaslighting. The stronger case involves a repeated pattern that systematically degrades the other person’s confidence in their memory, perception, or judgment. A single sincerely held but false belief is not enough.
Is saying “you’re too sensitive” gaslighting?
Not by itself. It can be dismissive or emotionally invalidating. It becomes relevant to gaslighting when it is part of a broader pattern that teaches the person to distrust their own perceptions, reactions, or capacity to interpret what is happening.
Does gaslighting require lying?
No. Deliberate gaslighting often contains lies, but lying is neither necessary under every scholarly account nor sufficient to establish gaslighting. The distinctive issue is the repeated undermining of epistemic self-trust.
Does harmful impact prove gaslighting?
No. Harm deserves attention, but confusion, anxiety, self-doubt, or distress can result from many interpersonal and psychological processes. Impact is part of the analysis, not a stand-alone diagnostic test for a relationship dynamic.
Can two people gaslight each other?
Two people can certainly deny, invalidate, deceive, or distort during conflict. Many gaslighting theories, however, emphasize epistemic leverage, trust, or power that allows one person’s account to become authoritative over the other’s. When both people are simply entrenched in incompatible accounts, “high-conflict disagreement,” “mutual invalidation,” or a description of the specific behaviors may be more accurate than assuming reciprocal gaslighting.
Can unintentional gaslighting still be abusive?
A repeated reality-undermining pattern can be psychologically harmful regardless of whether every act was consciously planned. Whether the broader relationship should be described as abusive depends on pattern, context, power, coercion, fear, control, and other behaviors. One comment or one memory conflict cannot establish that conclusion.
Does intent matter if the impact is the same?
Intent matters for understanding the behavior, responsibility, risk, and likely response to correction. Impact matters for harm and support. Neither should erase the other. The safest analysis keeps intent, behavior, pattern, impact, and accountability separate.
How can I tell the difference between gaslighting and a genuine memory conflict?
Look for whether uncertainty can remain uncertainty. In an ordinary memory conflict, evidence can be checked, either person can be wrong, and disagreement does not become proof that one person is irrational. In a gaslighting-like pattern, the dispute repeatedly becomes an argument that the target cannot trust themselves, and contrary evidence may be absorbed into further attacks on their credibility.
Can someone stop gaslighting if they were not aware of doing it?
Change is more plausible when a person can recognize the behavior, tolerate accountability, respond to evidence, and practice different conflict habits. Research specifically testing interventions for gaslighting is still limited, so claims about treatment success rates would go beyond the current evidence.
Related Articles
References
Abramson, K. (2014). Turning up the lights on gaslighting. Philosophical Perspectives, 28(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12046
Adair, J. (2025). Defining gaslighting in gender-based violence: A mixed-methods systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380251344316
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). About DSM-5-TR. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/about-dsm
Darke, L., Paterson, H., & van Golde, C. (2025). Public perceptions of gaslighting: Understanding definitions, recognition, and responses. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 42(11), 3172–3195. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075251366643
Darke, L., Paterson, H., & van Golde, C. (2026). Illuminating gaslighting: A comprehensive interdisciplinary review of gaslighting literature. Journal of Family Violence, 41, 1325–1341. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-025-00805-4
Hailes, H. P., & Goodman, L. A. (2025). “They’re out to take away your sanity”: A qualitative investigation of gaslighting in intimate partner violence. Journal of Family Violence, 40(2), 269–282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-023-00652-1
Kirk-Giannini, C. D. (2025). Gaslighting and epistemic competence. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 30(4), 665–672. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v30i4.3557
Klein, W., Li, S., & Wood, S. (2023). A qualitative analysis of gaslighting in romantic relationships. Personal Relationships, 30(4), 1316–1340. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12510
Klein, W., Wood, S., & Bartz, J. A. (2026). A theoretical framework for studying the phenomenon of gaslighting. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 30(2), 195–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/10888683251342291
Klein, W., Wood, S., Forget, A.-A., & Bartz, J. A. (2026). A historical review of gaslighting: Tracing changing conceptualizations within psychiatry and psychology. Clinical Psychology Review, 126, 102742. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2026.102742
World Health Organization. (2024). Clinical descriptions and diagnostic requirements for ICD-11 mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders (CDDR). https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240077263