Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead

Bellet, Benjamin W.; Jones, Payton J.; McNally, Richard J.

doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.07.002

Cited by 60 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

100

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Passages were standardized by length, and participants were shown the passages for a minimum of 20 seconds before they were allowed to proceed to the next screen. The passages were previously rated on the degree to which they provoked anxiety in a pilot study (Bellet et al, 2018 death; e.g., the murder scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment). After each passage, participants rated their emotional state by using slider bars ranging from 0 (not at all) to 100 (very much) on seven emotions: sad, happy, afraid, anxious, angry, content, and disgusted.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet due to their grassroots origin in a non-clinical setting, trigger warnings have expanded for years without the rigorous scientific evaluation that normally accompanies such interventions. Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018) were among the first to experimentally test the effect of trigger warnings. In a crowd-sourced sample of individuals who had not experienced past trauma, they found that trigger warnings given before literature passages had no significant effect on anxiety.…”

Section: Helping or Harming? The Effect Of Trigger Warnings On Indivimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(2019) conducted a preregistered replication of the same protocol of Bellet et al (2018) with undergraduate college students. Their results suggest that trigger warnings created a trivially small, yet genuine increase in anxiety.…”

Section: Helping or Harming? The Effect Of Trigger Warnings On Indivimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the current study, we tested the effect of trigger warnings in a large sample of trauma survivors recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing platform. This preregistered study includes a direct replication of the experiment in Bellet et al (2018) and extends the paradigm to address questions specific to trauma survivors. Further exploratory analyses examined vulnerable subpopulations (e.g., those who had received a diagnosis of PTSD).…”

Section: Helping or Harming? The Effect Of Trigger Warnings On Indivimentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories

Jones

Bellet

McNally

2019

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective: Trigger warnings alert trauma survivors about potentially disturbing forthcoming content. However, most empirical studies on trigger warnings indicate that they are either functionally inert or cause small adverse side effects. These evaluations have been limited to either trauma-naïve participants or mixed samples. Accordingly, we tested whether trigger warnings would be psychologically beneficial in the most relevant population: survivors of serious trauma. Method: Our experiment was a preregistered replication and extension of a previous one (Bellet, Jones, & McNally, 2018); 451 trauma survivors were randomly assigned to either receive or not receive trigger warnings prior to reading potentially distressing passages from world literature. They provided their emotional reactions to each passage; self-reported anxiety was the primary dependent variable. Results: We found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for those who self-reported a PTSD diagnosis, or for those who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors' trauma matched the passages’ content. We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings countertherapeutically reinforce survivors' view of their trauma as central to their identity. Regarding replication hypotheses, the evidence was either ambiguous or substantially favored the hypothesis that trigger warnings have no effect. Conclusions: Trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors. It is less clear whether trigger warnings are explicitly harmful. However, such knowledge is unnecessary to adjudicate whether to use trigger warnings – because trigger warnings are consistently unhelpful, there is no evidence-based reason to use them.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Helping or Harming? The Effect Of Trigger Warnings On Indivimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Helping or Harming? The Effect Of Trigger Warnings On Indivimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Helping or Harming? The Effect Of Trigger Warnings On Indivimentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories

Jones

Bellet

McNally

2019

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It certainly does not prepare them for social work, where personal slights and value clashes are everyday occurrences. Moreover, it is not good for students' mental health, encouraging them to operate in states of anxiety verging on depression [37,38]. So, while protecting them from words and ideas that may or may not cause some kind of emotional discomfort is only a momentary solution, in the long run, it actually harms the students and, ultimately, the profession they enter into.…”

Section: Identity Politics and A Victimhood Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

‘You Can’t Say That!’: Critical Thinking, Identity Politics, and the Social Work Academy

Fenton

Smith

2019

Societies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent years have witnessed an eruption of what have been termed culture wars, often converging around the messier aspects of interpersonal relationships and corresponding identity issues that are complex, sensitive, and contested. These are emotive topics that are often colonised by activist groups, and consequently have become enveloped in particular regimes of truth and assertive identity politics. They are often also, by their nature, the kind of issues that are central to social work practice. This can lead to pressure on social workers and social work students to think that these orthodoxies ought to underpin and define the profession, which in turn can lead to the silencing of alternative opinions and the closing down of dissent. This article seeks to locate identity politics in a political and cultural context. It goes on to set out classic arguments for free speech, viewpoint diversity, and for the need for social work to embrace and engage with such. It explores the notion that the closing down of debate about contentious issues, the disincentives that exist to expressing controversial opinions, and the uncritical adoption of ideological orthodoxies work against the development of the critical thinking skills that are essential for social work practice.

show abstract

The discourse of being ‘triggered’: Uses and meanings among counselling students

Bonilla

Natarajan

Koven

et al. 2022

Couns and Psychother Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the initial understanding of the word ‘triggered’ as relating to the clinical phenomenon of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this language has become a common part of the vernacular today, used by many people to apply to a wide variety of experiences and events. Counselling students are particularly sensitised to trauma, as well as identity politics, and are familiar with trigger warnings at college. They themselves have experienced trauma at high rates. Therefore, we were interested to understand how they might be using the word and interpreting the experience of being ‘triggered’, whether different sources of being triggered are related to emotional reactions, and whether a discourse analysis might indicate how and why the term has become useful and for what other experiences it might be serving as a stand‐in. In this mixed‐methods study, 79 counselling students from around the country shared their definitions and experiences of being ‘triggered’. Participants completed surveys and wrote narratives, which, via thematic qualitative analysis, were coded into five themes. The quantitative analysis focused on the relationship of feelings to themes and the relationship between anger suppression and coping with each theme. Discourse analysis explored how individuals wrote about responsibility and anger. It was discovered that those who wrote about being triggered from a past sexual assault did not discuss anger, nor the responsibility of others to protect them (as those who wrote about microaggressions did), but positioned themselves as overreactors. Results are discussed with regard to training and practice.

show abstract

Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead

Cited by 60 publications

References 30 publications

Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories

Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories

‘You Can’t Say That!’: Critical Thinking, Identity Politics, and the Social Work Academy

The discourse of being ‘triggered’: Uses and meanings among counselling students

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About