7 ms·

New research suggests that trigger warnings do not reduce negative reactions

27 points by crackercrews 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago
[flagged]
- bananamerica 5y ago
  I don't think you understand what trigger warnings are.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - UIUC_06 5y ago
    Really? How can you tell? What don't I understand?
    - crackercrews 5y ago
      GP was replying to another comment, not yours.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
auslegung 5y ago
> The results of around a dozen psychological studies, published between 2018 and 2021, are remarkably consistent, and they differ from conventional wisdom: they find that trigger warnings do not seem to lessen negative reactions to disturbing material in students, trauma survivors, or those diagnosed with P.T.S.D. Indeed, some studies suggest that the opposite may be true. The first one, conducted at Harvard by Benjamin Bellet, a Ph.D. candidate, Payton Jones, who completed his Ph.D. in 2021, and Richard McNally, a psychology professor and the author of “Remembering Trauma,” found that, among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not. (The study found that, among those who do not strongly believe words can cause harm, trigger warnings did not significantly increase anxiety.) Most of the flurry of studies that followed found that trigger warnings had no meaningful effect, but two of them found that individuals who received trigger warnings experienced more distress than those who did not. Yet another study suggested that trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories. A large study by Jones, Bellet, and McNally found that trigger warnings reinforced the belief on the part of trauma survivors that trauma was central (rather than incidental or peripheral) to their identity. The reason that effect may be concerning is that trauma researchers have previously established that a belief that trauma is central to one’s identity predicts more severe P.T.S.D.; Bellet called this “one of the most well documented relationships in traumatology.” The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect.
- tapan_jk 5y ago
  I always thought that the warning lets one walk away before they get triggered. Of course, this would not be possible in every situation, but if I am watching news and see a warning for e.g., I can stop watching. Edit: there are many other comments which showed up just this minute which say the same thing. Hence, I just repeated what others seem to concur with too.
- taurath 5y ago
  Slightly OT re trigger warnings, but Richard McNally is on one particular side of a very active debate within trauma-focused psychology, especially around memory repression. "Remembering Trauma" makes some very large conclusions that are by no means accepted widely. Not that he's a demagogue, but I think there's not really a full accepted understanding of how memory works or doesn't work on traumatized people's brains. A large segment of clinicians absolutely do work off the idea that memories are repressed, though not in the "amnesia" sense, but rather more as something pushed deep down, or instinctively avoided and less accessible. > The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect. Personal opinion as someone who's dealt with trauma - a trigger warning reminds me of trauma in general, but its absolutely better than entering into say a piece of fiction with a prominent traumatic scene I'd identify with, with no warning. One can make me feel slightly worse, one can put me in a full on flashback. OTOH, there's not really a reasonable line that's been developed yet as to what deserves TWs and what doesn't, in which contexts. If you allow for it in all situations where someone could possibly benefit from it then you're not really free to do very much. In the context of say a trauma forum though it makes much more sense to try to tag as much as you can. Finally this stuff isn't new. We have the MPAA making ratings explicitly around movies about the themes involved. Broadcast media isn't allowed to curse because a lot of the audience can't handle it. TV News has said "Warning, this may be tough to watch" for decades.
Grakel 5y ago
Good, let's stop using them and go back to talking about bad things like adults who have a reasonable grip on their feelings.
- xvector 5y ago
  It 100% isn't adult behavior to talk about a subject that triggers someone if you know it may trigger them. For example, functional adults don't discuss topics like rape unless they are reasonably certain that discussion participants do not have an associated traumatic experience. The purpose of trigger warnings is to let people excuse themselves if you do not have that familiarity or certainty with your audience, e.g. a classroom setting. I'd argue that not using trigger warnings for such topics with unfamiliar people is immature and callous.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    Life should not be a walled garden where we can control what topics come up. Life is beautiful because it is unpredictable, and I dare say painful at times.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > It 100% isn't adult behavior to talk about a subject that triggers someone if you know it may trigger them. The problem is that we have an epidemic of people who are triggered by normal words and even the mention of important topics -- like rape, murder, wars, etc -- that ordinary people do need to talk about, so when your sensitivity expands so much as to infringe on the ability of healthy adults to discuss the issues of their day, that's when it's no longer the case that adults can avoid discussing any topic that might upset the fragile minority.
    - Imnimo 5y ago
      > it's no longer the case that adults can avoid discussing any topic that might upset the fragile minority. Isn't that the point of a warning? You're still going to discuss it, just with a warning up front. If you were going to avoid discussing it, you wouldn't need a warning.
tshaddox 5y ago
The huge surprise to me is that I always thought the point of the warnings was to give readers the opportunity to simply not read the material, not to somehow lessen negative effects when they do read the material.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  If you are in a class or a lecture, you can't just skip over parts of the material without hurting your understanding.
  - onionisafruit 5y ago
    That’s correct, but you can decide to skip over parts because you value your emotional well-being more than your understanding of a subject.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      As an individual, you could try plugging your ears I guess, but it would certainly be disruptive to have half the class file out of the lecture, wait for some kind of signal, and then file back in.
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    OK, I will accept that premise, from which it follows that if the whole class skips over these parts of the material, then everyone's understanding is hurt - so what are you going to do? It seems the choices are either that we accept that certain people should avoid certain topics (which is not a controversial position when the topic is, say, mathematics) or that all potentially-disturbing topics are off-limits (at least mathematics will probably survive in that case.)
- ericb 5y ago
  Right, but this is saying trigger warnings re-victimize the party by placing the event on a pedestal and assuming fragility. My daughter got stung by a bee on her eye. For quite a while, she didn't want to go outside if there was any bee, anywhere, which there usually is. I could decide that for the rest of her life, bees are triggering, and help her avoid them and lead her with my expectation that as a bee-victim, she of course would never want to leave the house again. Or I could do what I did, and not make a big deal of bees and not warn her every summer day that she might not want to go outside because there's a bee in the yard. I fully acknowledge that there are things far far worse than bees, however I think the same principles apply. If you look at therapeutic psychological treatment for phobias--the treatment is exposure, and desensitization, not avoidance and magnification. Is it fair to assume victims want to wear a scarlet V? Or to promote the implicit message that avoidance is the correct response to trauma?
tehjoker 5y ago
I thought the point of a trigger warning was to enable people with PTSD or anxiety disorders to leave the room or avoid the material rather than sit though it and feel worse. "“the point is not to enable—let alone encourage—students to skip these readings or our subsequent class discussion (both of which are mandatory in my courses, absent a formal exemption). Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves for reading about them, and better manage their reactions.” " I feel that this professor has completely reversed the material benefit of it. If you say this could cause you severe anxiety but I'm going to make you sit though it anyway what was the point? It doesn't surprise me that if you trap the audience and warn them it will make them feel worse.
- burnte 5y ago
  As someone who dealt with some severe PTSD issues at a young age, I think trigger warnings are counterproductive. You don't get over PTSD triggers by avoiding them, you get past them with therapy and exposure. You have to retrain your brain to react differently to similar stimuli. Trigger warnings simply encourage people to continue living in hell.
  - mosen 5y ago
    There’s some importance in being exposed when you’re (somewhat) prepared for it - otherwise it can etch the natural reaction deeper.
  - Imnimo 5y ago
    I certainly buy that exposure is important in treating PTSD, but that seems like a decision the patient and their doctor should be able to make. If I'm a teacher, for a student, I feel like I'd rather let a student make the decision about whether they want that exposure or not. It's not my job to decide what's good for their PSTD and how to treat it. If their doctor tells them they should seek out exposure, they can make that decision for themselves.
    - crackercrews 5y ago
delecti 5y ago
What a tiring argument. The point of trigger warnings is that they allow you to not engage with content you don't feel comfortable engaging with. If you warn someone about a trigger that applies to them, but then make them read that content anyway, then you've just shown that you can make someone suffer by warning them before forcing them to endure something uncomfortable. > among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not A valid interpretation of this result is that people who think words can cause harm are correct with regards to their personal experiences. In other news, people who say they're allergic to peanuts on average have a worse reaction to being forced to eat peanuts.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >The point of trigger warnings is that they allow you to not engage with content you don't feel comfortable engaging with. Unfortunately the world is filled with things that we are all uncomfortable with. Teaching young people that they can simply close their eyes and plug their ears as a way of dealing with a word or an idea that they aren't comfortable with is the opposite of what we should be doing in schools, let alone colleges.
  - citruscomputing 5y ago
    If this were about, say, the color yellow, or a political ideology (even a reprehensible one), I would 100% agree with you. I see where you're coming from - we all want our peers to be resilient in the face of difficulty. I don't think that schools are hindering this goal by using trigger warnings. Gah, I'm sorry. I tried to write about some of my own difficulties that trigger warnings help me with, but couldn't get it to come out right. The point I was trying to make was that e.g. forcing a sexual assault survivor to watch a film depicting rape, with no warning, seems needlessly cruel.
gfodor 5y ago
Trigger warnings are ridiculed by many because they direct attention to the reaction people could have, and can lead to imagining people avoiding speech that merely makes them uncomfortable, or contradicts their world view, etc. We already have movie ratings which dispassionately encode the content without jumping ahead to the idea of how people may react to it. I feel like a content-oriented labeling system that dispassionately summarizes potentially volatile concepts in a work would be useful for many use cases including those with PTSD would be a much more useful concept. It would, however, be less useful as a tool to create political division, so perhaps that is why it is not used.
- taurath 5y ago
  'Content warning: the word "trigger" is used.' I don't really believe there is anything that won't be politicized nowadays, especially if it doesn't fit with what people's memories tell them was the "good way that things used to be".
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I agree with this as far as it goes, but I see a reasonable number of trigger warnings in the wild, and the vast majority are exactly the kind of content-oriented labels you're envisioning. This is one of those issues where crazy edge cases capture 100% of the press coverage.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  My FB generally give "content warnings" - describe any intense or disturbing content a post might have.
UIUC_06 5y ago
How tiresome that all the posters think "trigger warning" should continue to be a thing. Haven't you figured out yet that it was, and continues to be, a dumb idea? Life is harder for some than for others. Trying to be extra kind to the people for whom it's harder is simply infantilizing for everyone.
booleandilemma 5y ago
I didn’t know anyone took trigger warnings seriously. I’m glad I don’t hang out with anyone who does. Trigger warning: The world is a harsh place by default. Thomas Hobbes said it best when he called life “nasty, brutish, and short”. The first noble truth of Buddhism is “Life is suffering”. The solution is to try to make things better, not to deny reality and act like a two-year old rocking back and forth telling yourself everything is hunky dory.
smitty1e 5y ago
There is always the approach of maturing people to the point that they can bear the uglinesses of reality and flawed human beings.

27 points by crackercrews 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago

[flagged]

bananamerica 5y ago
I don't think you understand what trigger warnings are.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- UIUC_06 5y ago
  Really? How can you tell? What don't I understand?
  - crackercrews 5y ago
    GP was replying to another comment, not yours.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

auslegung 5y ago

> The results of around a dozen psychological studies, published between 2018 and 2021, are remarkably consistent, and they differ from conventional wisdom: they find that trigger warnings do not seem to lessen negative reactions to disturbing material in students, trauma survivors, or those diagnosed with P.T.S.D. Indeed, some studies suggest that the opposite may be true. The first one, conducted at Harvard by Benjamin Bellet, a Ph.D. candidate, Payton Jones, who completed his Ph.D. in 2021, and Richard McNally, a psychology professor and the author of “Remembering Trauma,” found that, among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not. (The study found that, among those who do not strongly believe words can cause harm, trigger warnings did not significantly increase anxiety.) Most of the flurry of studies that followed found that trigger warnings had no meaningful effect, but two of them found that individuals who received trigger warnings experienced more distress than those who did not. Yet another study suggested that trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories. A large study by Jones, Bellet, and McNally found that trigger warnings reinforced the belief on the part of trauma survivors that trauma was central (rather than incidental or peripheral) to their identity. The reason that effect may be concerning is that trauma researchers have previously established that a belief that trauma is central to one’s identity predicts more severe P.T.S.D.; Bellet called this “one of the most well documented relationships in traumatology.” The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect.

tapan_jk 5y ago
I always thought that the warning lets one walk away before they get triggered. Of course, this would not be possible in every situation, but if I am watching news and see a warning for e.g., I can stop watching. Edit: there are many other comments which showed up just this minute which say the same thing. Hence, I just repeated what others seem to concur with too.
taurath 5y ago
Slightly OT re trigger warnings, but Richard McNally is on one particular side of a very active debate within trauma-focused psychology, especially around memory repression. "Remembering Trauma" makes some very large conclusions that are by no means accepted widely. Not that he's a demagogue, but I think there's not really a full accepted understanding of how memory works or doesn't work on traumatized people's brains. A large segment of clinicians absolutely do work off the idea that memories are repressed, though not in the "amnesia" sense, but rather more as something pushed deep down, or instinctively avoided and less accessible. > The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect. Personal opinion as someone who's dealt with trauma - a trigger warning reminds me of trauma in general, but its absolutely better than entering into say a piece of fiction with a prominent traumatic scene I'd identify with, with no warning. One can make me feel slightly worse, one can put me in a full on flashback. OTOH, there's not really a reasonable line that's been developed yet as to what deserves TWs and what doesn't, in which contexts. If you allow for it in all situations where someone could possibly benefit from it then you're not really free to do very much. In the context of say a trauma forum though it makes much more sense to try to tag as much as you can. Finally this stuff isn't new. We have the MPAA making ratings explicitly around movies about the themes involved. Broadcast media isn't allowed to curse because a lot of the audience can't handle it. TV News has said "Warning, this may be tough to watch" for decades.

Grakel 5y ago

Good, let's stop using them and go back to talking about bad things like adults who have a reasonable grip on their feelings.

xvector 5y ago
It 100% isn't adult behavior to talk about a subject that triggers someone if you know it may trigger them. For example, functional adults don't discuss topics like rape unless they are reasonably certain that discussion participants do not have an associated traumatic experience. The purpose of trigger warnings is to let people excuse themselves if you do not have that familiarity or certainty with your audience, e.g. a classroom setting. I'd argue that not using trigger warnings for such topics with unfamiliar people is immature and callous.
- Grakel 5y ago
  Life should not be a walled garden where we can control what topics come up. Life is beautiful because it is unpredictable, and I dare say painful at times.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > It 100% isn't adult behavior to talk about a subject that triggers someone if you know it may trigger them. The problem is that we have an epidemic of people who are triggered by normal words and even the mention of important topics -- like rape, murder, wars, etc -- that ordinary people do need to talk about, so when your sensitivity expands so much as to infringe on the ability of healthy adults to discuss the issues of their day, that's when it's no longer the case that adults can avoid discussing any topic that might upset the fragile minority.
  - Imnimo 5y ago
    > it's no longer the case that adults can avoid discussing any topic that might upset the fragile minority. Isn't that the point of a warning? You're still going to discuss it, just with a warning up front. If you were going to avoid discussing it, you wouldn't need a warning.

tshaddox 5y ago

The huge surprise to me is that I always thought the point of the warnings was to give readers the opportunity to simply not read the material, not to somehow lessen negative effects when they do read the material.

rsj_hn 5y ago
If you are in a class or a lecture, you can't just skip over parts of the material without hurting your understanding.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  That’s correct, but you can decide to skip over parts because you value your emotional well-being more than your understanding of a subject.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    As an individual, you could try plugging your ears I guess, but it would certainly be disruptive to have half the class file out of the lecture, wait for some kind of signal, and then file back in.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  OK, I will accept that premise, from which it follows that if the whole class skips over these parts of the material, then everyone's understanding is hurt - so what are you going to do? It seems the choices are either that we accept that certain people should avoid certain topics (which is not a controversial position when the topic is, say, mathematics) or that all potentially-disturbing topics are off-limits (at least mathematics will probably survive in that case.)
ericb 5y ago
Right, but this is saying trigger warnings re-victimize the party by placing the event on a pedestal and assuming fragility. My daughter got stung by a bee on her eye. For quite a while, she didn't want to go outside if there was any bee, anywhere, which there usually is. I could decide that for the rest of her life, bees are triggering, and help her avoid them and lead her with my expectation that as a bee-victim, she of course would never want to leave the house again. Or I could do what I did, and not make a big deal of bees and not warn her every summer day that she might not want to go outside because there's a bee in the yard. I fully acknowledge that there are things far far worse than bees, however I think the same principles apply. If you look at therapeutic psychological treatment for phobias--the treatment is exposure, and desensitization, not avoidance and magnification. Is it fair to assume victims want to wear a scarlet V? Or to promote the implicit message that avoidance is the correct response to trauma?

tehjoker 5y ago

I thought the point of a trigger warning was to enable people with PTSD or anxiety disorders to leave the room or avoid the material rather than sit though it and feel worse. "“the point is not to enable—let alone encourage—students to skip these readings or our subsequent class discussion (both of which are mandatory in my courses, absent a formal exemption). Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves for reading about them, and better manage their reactions.” " I feel that this professor has completely reversed the material benefit of it. If you say this could cause you severe anxiety but I'm going to make you sit though it anyway what was the point? It doesn't surprise me that if you trap the audience and warn them it will make them feel worse.

burnte 5y ago
As someone who dealt with some severe PTSD issues at a young age, I think trigger warnings are counterproductive. You don't get over PTSD triggers by avoiding them, you get past them with therapy and exposure. You have to retrain your brain to react differently to similar stimuli. Trigger warnings simply encourage people to continue living in hell.
- mosen 5y ago
  There’s some importance in being exposed when you’re (somewhat) prepared for it - otherwise it can etch the natural reaction deeper.
- Imnimo 5y ago
  I certainly buy that exposure is important in treating PTSD, but that seems like a decision the patient and their doctor should be able to make. If I'm a teacher, for a student, I feel like I'd rather let a student make the decision about whether they want that exposure or not. It's not my job to decide what's good for their PSTD and how to treat it. If their doctor tells them they should seek out exposure, they can make that decision for themselves.
  - crackercrews 5y ago

delecti 5y ago

What a tiring argument. The point of trigger warnings is that they allow you to not engage with content you don't feel comfortable engaging with. If you warn someone about a trigger that applies to them, but then make them read that content anyway, then you've just shown that you can make someone suffer by warning them before forcing them to endure something uncomfortable. > among people who said they believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not A valid interpretation of this result is that people who think words can cause harm are correct with regards to their personal experiences. In other news, people who say they're allergic to peanuts on average have a worse reaction to being forced to eat peanuts.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>The point of trigger warnings is that they allow you to not engage with content you don't feel comfortable engaging with. Unfortunately the world is filled with things that we are all uncomfortable with. Teaching young people that they can simply close their eyes and plug their ears as a way of dealing with a word or an idea that they aren't comfortable with is the opposite of what we should be doing in schools, let alone colleges.
- citruscomputing 5y ago
  If this were about, say, the color yellow, or a political ideology (even a reprehensible one), I would 100% agree with you. I see where you're coming from - we all want our peers to be resilient in the face of difficulty. I don't think that schools are hindering this goal by using trigger warnings. Gah, I'm sorry. I tried to write about some of my own difficulties that trigger warnings help me with, but couldn't get it to come out right. The point I was trying to make was that e.g. forcing a sexual assault survivor to watch a film depicting rape, with no warning, seems needlessly cruel.

gfodor 5y ago

Trigger warnings are ridiculed by many because they direct attention to the reaction people could have, and can lead to imagining people avoiding speech that merely makes them uncomfortable, or contradicts their world view, etc. We already have movie ratings which dispassionately encode the content without jumping ahead to the idea of how people may react to it. I feel like a content-oriented labeling system that dispassionately summarizes potentially volatile concepts in a work would be useful for many use cases including those with PTSD would be a much more useful concept. It would, however, be less useful as a tool to create political division, so perhaps that is why it is not used.

taurath 5y ago
'Content warning: the word "trigger" is used.' I don't really believe there is anything that won't be politicized nowadays, especially if it doesn't fit with what people's memories tell them was the "good way that things used to be".
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I agree with this as far as it goes, but I see a reasonable number of trigger warnings in the wild, and the vast majority are exactly the kind of content-oriented labels you're envisioning. This is one of those issues where crazy edge cases capture 100% of the press coverage.
joe_the_user 5y ago
My FB generally give "content warnings" - describe any intense or disturbing content a post might have.

UIUC_06 5y ago

How tiresome that all the posters think "trigger warning" should continue to be a thing. Haven't you figured out yet that it was, and continues to be, a dumb idea? Life is harder for some than for others. Trying to be extra kind to the people for whom it's harder is simply infantilizing for everyone.

booleandilemma 5y ago

I didn’t know anyone took trigger warnings seriously. I’m glad I don’t hang out with anyone who does. Trigger warning: The world is a harsh place by default. Thomas Hobbes said it best when he called life “nasty, brutish, and short”. The first noble truth of Buddhism is “Life is suffering”. The solution is to try to make things better, not to deny reality and act like a two-year old rocking back and forth telling yourself everything is hunky dory.

smitty1e 5y ago

There is always the approach of maturing people to the point that they can bear the uglinesses of reality and flawed human beings.