I'd suggest you check out the books I mentioned.

The case studies written in Robert Lifton's book, "Thought Reform, and the Psychology of Totalism", have many details of the elements, taken from first-hand accounts (PoWs), back in the 50s. Many of these people never recovered.

Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind has an overview of the process, observations, and some early diagnostic criteria (Schizophrenia/delusion is often found as a characteristic in such early cases).

More recently, Social Engineering in the context of movie character design touches on another aspect where distorted reflected appraisal is used to often impart gender or cultural maladaptive behaviors, or destructively interfere in belief systems, such as religion, or groups (the nuclear family), under a guise of inclusion.

Pixar and Disney are two companies which often touch on this subject matter, Apple too, and there have been whistleblowers from the first, who have come out and talked about what happens behind close doors.

Some examples, association of the handsome man always being the evil villain (targeting teen women), the religious or trusted community figure or leader acting and looking crazy and goofy with no one paying attention, the hero being so weak they need to be defended by their romantic interests (targeting teen men), or their romantic interests emasculating them in the guise of defending them (targeting women), normalizing maladaptive behavior that only causes friction between genders, and other cohorts. Similar targeting for the nuclear family, where mimicking behavior (something kids naturally do) becomes malign.

I remember reading some studies where language processing was examined. I can't quite remember where it was from now but basically Children read differently from adults, where descriptive language is modified indirectly. Children take the literal (first simple meaning and stick to it), whereas adults get the correct context after gymnastics.

Basically, with enough natural/destructive friction, people isolate themselves to limit exposure which makes the messaging all the more effective for the majority of the population, as long as you hit those three things I previously mentioned.

As torture is an involuntarily induced hypnotic state, you can find a good deal of more modern material under hypnotism (bypassing the critical factor/attention, and hypnotic reversals which cause irrational emotional response against something when they believe they notice the manipulation.

The TV Show Hannibal, used similar means to induce and associate delight in the audience with the colorfully posed victims, of the serial killer, which was sickening on so many levels.

Igor Ledochowski has several programs, Mindbending Language, and Conversational Hypnosis which take this to SOTA back in 2000.

NLP and Cult deprogramming has been an active area of research.

There are many areas where these things intersect, some relying on distorting communication as that is usually the simplest way to distort reflected appraisal, others to shape sentiment.

Karma bots on social media as an example of the latter (where karma dictates whether you are squelched or not by the majority).

The large tech companies basically used their government funding and constructed echo chambers for all of us individually. Inconsistency in reflected appraisal tends to drive us crazy (as humans), but also leaves us in a state where we are easily manipulated (Joost Meerloo touches on this robotization that inevitably is inflicted on the individual within totalitarian societies).

Google had a leak of their selfish ledger awhile back for a concrete example of the sophistication of the propaganda. While, horrifically flawed, its still convincing if you didn't know better (which is a result of inoculation).

Quite a lot of this research originated in Russia/China, but has continued globally under Irregular Warfare/Political Warfare subject matter. If you have a high discernment, going to the source material and understanding what is meant can provide useful insights, as well as the history of the Jesuits (which Marx/Engels seemed to have stolen somewhat heavily from).

Psycho-politick was interesting as well, albeit older. There is a ebook available from USMC Press on Political Warfare (published 2020), albeit doesn't touch as much as I'd like on the nuts and bolts.

Most of this has until just recently, been understood by those in the know, but publicly discounted/nullified. The history is quite interesting on its own, albeit hard to piece together given the clandestine nature of it all. A lot of this falls under regime-change strategy, and military doctrine of divide and conquer.

If you can segment people into roughly three groups, one unresponsive, one psychotic, and one rational. The rational cohort is too busy offsetting the fires created by the psychotic, and only a small group is needed (in theory) following a four stage process. Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Re-normalization, based in psychology.

Hopefully that provides some useful springboards for your research. Knowing how it happens, can provide some useful defensive measures, albeit one must be careful about anchoring on stimuli, since people who use some of the more sophisticated aspects often will notice the lack of effect, and adjust and will often try to invert, or induce an irrational reaction, which can bypass simple measures, and you can't remain hyper-vigilant all the time without detrimental effects (jumping as shadows). They'll paint you as a crazy person after goading you to destroy your social credibility.