Are Trigger Warnings Actually Helpful?

The phrase "trigger warning" arose in online forums for the benefit of those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is described as remarks that warn of a negative emotional response to potentially unpleasant stimuli.

The word has become ubiquitous in popular culture during the last five years. This includes college campuses, where academics are included trigger warnings in their curricula.

According to one poll, 50% of instructors have used trigger warnings in the classroom, and some colleges have even instituted laws requiring trigger warnings.

For some, the widespread use of trigger warnings is a wonderful and caring thing; for others, it is a major violation of free expression and may even herald the end of society as we know it.

From a psychological standpoint, one may argue either way. On the one hand, trigger warnings may motivate people to better manage their emotions.

Being able to predict a response might indeed make you more proactive in stress management if you have such abilities. The same study, however, reveals that anticipating a specific reaction might induce one to overstate the predicted response.

People who were told that a suspenseful video clip had graphic violence, for example, experienced considerably greater discomfort than those who were told that the graphic violence component had been removed.

According to other research, giving patients a full list of every probable adverse event may actually increase side effects.

It's also likely that trigger warnings cause people to have even more intrusive thoughts in the aftermath. After all, if I urge you not to think about a pink elephant, you're going to think about pink elephants even more.

Of course, trigger warnings do not instruct you to completely avoid the material, but those who choose to ignore the information are probably setting themselves up to think about it even more (or even worse, make the content out to be worse in their mind than it is in actuality).

The Science of Trigger Warning:

In recent years, academics have begun to rigorously evaluate the usefulness of trigger warnings. Benjamin Bellet and his colleagues discovered evidence that trigger warnings may accidentally decrease resilience in their work titled "Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead."

They discovered that persons who were randomly allocated to receive trigger warnings before reading literary passages experienced more anxiety in reaction to potentially unpleasant passages, but only if they felt that words might do harm.

According to a tweet by one of the authors, anyone having a history of exposure to a very painful incident was not permitted to continue the experiment, which included about half of those who began it!

Izzy Gainsburg and Allison Earl discovered in the second set of trials that trigger warnings raised anticipation of unpleasant responses to warned-of information and increased avoidance of the content.

This conclusion was especially significant for individuals who felt trigger warnings were protective (versus coddling).

Furthermore, individuals who felt trigger warnings were protective (rather than coddling) were more likely to predict unpleasant feelings, resulting in higher avoidance of the warned-of content.

The effects of trigger warnings on three symptoms of people's distress:

1. Negative effect following exposure to negative material,

2. Intrusive thoughts related to the negative material, and

3. Avoidance of reminders of the negative material.

They gave some participants (but not others) a trigger warning, exposed everyone to stressful content, and assessed their distress symptoms over six studies. The researchers then ran summary statistics on the entire dataset (a total of 1,394 participants) to determine the effect size of trigger warnings.

There are more issues with trigger warnings. Even if they worked, how would we go about issuing them for every potential trigger? Distinct people have different triggers depending on personal experiences that may or may not be related to what the typical person thinks unsettling or graphic.

Trigger warnings may have been established with the best of intentions, but they have since been proven in research after study to be ineffective.

Trigger warnings, like many random supplements, are generally worthless for most people and maybe, though not conclusively, a bit damaging to individuals. So, with no apparent upside, why take the risk?

Perhaps because it is so simple to issue one and feel as though you are doing something beneficial. Keep in mind that doing so may come at the price of doing something that might genuinely assist.

Written By- Tanya C