15/08/2022, 11:39 New study says trigger warnings are useless. Does that mean they should be abandoned?

Death Knell for Trigger Warnings?

A new study says trigger warnings are useless. Does that mean they should be abandoned?

By  Colleen Flaherty (/users/colleen-flaherty)

// March 21, 2019

Trigger warnings don’t help students, and they might even hurt those grappling with serious trauma.
That’s the upshot of a new study on trigger warnings (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2167702619827018?
journalCode=cpxa) published in Clinical Psychological Science.

Concerned about the use of trigger warnings absent clear evidence of their effectiveness, the
authors conducted a series of experiments on 1,394 people, a mix of first-year psychology students
at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand and internet users. They wanted to know to
what extent trigger warnings affect people's ratings of negative material and their symptoms of
distress, namely "negative affect," intrusive thoughts and avoidance.

Subjects either watched or read content on topics from car accidents to domestic violence (content
involving sexual violence was not part of the experiment -- more on that later). Some got trigger
warnings about what was ahead, while others did not. Some reported experiencing traumatic
events, such as a "really bad car" or other accident, or domestic abuse.

Afterward, subjects rated their negative emotional states, and the degree to which they experienced
intrusive thoughts and tried to avoid thinking about the content. Some subjects were tested on their
reading comprehension abilities following exposure to sensitive content.

A “mini meta-analysis” of the experiments revealed that trigger warnings didn’t make any difference.
Subjects who saw them, compared with those who did not, judged the videos to be similarly
negative, felt similarly negative, experienced similarly frequent intrusive thoughts and avoidance,
and comprehended subsequent material similarly well.

By some measures, there was a slight helpful effect for trigger warnings. But the authors say that it
was essentially insignificant, was "minuscule" compared to the effects of actual therapy and was
possibly influenced by a placebo-like effect of seeing a trigger warning (trigger warnings are not
supposed to be a substitute for therapy, of course, the article says). It's worth noting that a very
small number of students withdrew from the experiment after seeing a trigger warning. And
the existing psychological literature on traumatic stress suggests that avoidance is a coping
mechanism that maintains the traumatic stress.

The study notes several limitations: researchers did not specifically recruit people with a history of
psychopathology and did not ask about subjects’ socioeconomic status or education level. Plus,
they say, trigger warnings “may have nontrivial effects we did not measure,” such as the vividness of
intrusions -- not just frequency.
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15/08/2022, 11:39 New study says trigger warnings are useless. Does that mean they should be abandoned?

What does it all mean? The authors explore this, writing, “Some might wonder if professors should
continue to issue trigger warnings. After all, if the warnings do not worsen distress and students
believe the warnings are helpful, then why not?”

Ultimately, however, the authors are against trigger warnings. “Put simply,” they say, “people are not
always good judges of the effects interventions have on themselves or others and the chronic
effects of trigger warnings may be different from their acute effects. College students are
increasingly anxious, and widespread adoption of trigger warnings in syllabi may promote this trend,
tacitly encouraging students to turn to avoidance, thereby depriving them of opportunities to learn
healthier ways to manage potential distress.”

Lead author Mevagh Sanson, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychology at New Zealand’s
University of Waikato, didn’t equivocate Wednesday via email.

“Trigger warnings don’t help,” she said. “And they may still hurt -- the long-term consequences of
avoidance have been addressed in related areas, and so we know that encouraging avoidance helps
to maintain disorders such as PTSD.”

Drawing a distinction between general trigger warnings, such as at the beginning of a course, and
trigger warnings for “imminent” content (such as that included in the experiment), Sanson added,
“We do not think that trigger warnings for imminent content are a good idea.”

Trigger warnings were originally used by bloggers to flag content about sexual violence, and much
of the academic trigger warning debate centers on texts containing sexual violence -- and students
who have suffered it. Asked if the results might be different if content about sexual violence were
included in the study, Sanson said, “That is an empirical question, but there’s nothing solid in the
scientific or clinical science literature that would lead us to expect trigger warnings should be
effective for sexual assault and yet ineffective for other kinds of traumas or content.”

Sanson co-wrote the study with Deryn Strange, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, who studies memory distortion. Asked if she
ever uses trigger warnings, Strange said that she teaches “traumatic content all the time” -- and
explains that to students at the beginning of course, so that they are “broadly aware” of what may
come up. But, consistent with her recent findings, she does not issue trigger warnings for imminent
content.

Co-author Maryanne Garry, a professor of psychology at Waikato who teaches courses addressing
traumatic memory, said she makes her topics clear up front and tells students that “there is no way
to provide them with alternate readings or assessment while still actually teaching the topic.”

Are Warnings Common?

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15/08/2022, 11:39 New study says trigger warnings are useless. Does that mean they should be abandoned?

It’s unclear how widespread the use of trigger warnings is. A 2015 survey
of faculty
(https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/02/survey-sheds-new-light-faculty-attitudes-and-experiences-toward-trigger-warnings)

members by the National Coalition Against Censorship found that more than half of professors had
had issued “warnings about course content,” such as in a syllabus, and 23 percent said they’d done
so several times or regularly. But a majority of professors opposed specific trigger warnings as a
threat to academic freedom.

Trigger warning also means different things to different people. Some professors offer what they
call trigger warnings at the beginning of a course only and others for imminent content. And some
professors who use trigger warnings offer students alternative readings or assignments. That
practice is probably the most controversial of all, since critics say it comes at the cost of personal
growth and learning. Proponents, meanwhile, say offering alternative assignments may enable
learning by increasing access to those who would otherwise shut down.

Richard J. McNally, professor and director of clinical training in psychology at Harvard University,
studies anxiety and related disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, and wrote in a widely
cited 2016 New York Times op-ed (https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/09/13/do-trigger-warnings-work/if-you-need-a-trigger-
warning-you-need-ptsd-treatment) that the trigger warning debate ignores the fact that “Trauma is common, but

PTSD is rare.”

Still, McNally wrote, trigger warnings are “countertherapeutic because they encourage avoidance of
reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.” Severe emotional reactions triggered by
course material are a signal that “students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain
evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD,” he added. So
rather than issuing trigger warnings, “universities can best serve students by facilitating access to
effective and proven treatments for PTSD and other mental health problems.”

McNally, who chaired a symposium on trigger warnings at the recent International Conference of
Psychological Science in Paris, said Wednesday that the new paper is “impressive,” and that, taken
together, the experiments suggest that trigger warnings “don’t seem to make much difference.”

In all of his own courses, McNally said that he goes through the syllabus with students on the first
day of class to briefly review topics of study and readings. But he does not issue trigger warnings --
even when he taught a course on psychological trauma.

To students in that class, however, he said, “I did mention that enrolling in the course was not a
substitute for therapy, even though they would learn how clinicians successfully treat the effects of
traumatic stress.”

Over all, McNally said that trigger warnings are a “counsel of avoidance,” and hence “send the wrong
message to students struggling with memories of trauma.” Avoiding reminders of trauma maintains
PTSD, “despite any temporary relief avoidance may provide.”

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Underscoring his consistent message on how a university can “best serve its students,” McNally
said it’s by “facilitating their access to evidence-based treatments for PTSD, not by issuing trigger
warnings.”

Nancy K. Bristow, a professor of history at the University of Puget Sound who studies racial
violence, has spoken previously about the importance of empathy in teaching and learning about
such sensitive subjects as the history of lynching. She’s said she flagged her syllabus for students
the first time in 2015, for a course on American culture and catastrophe.

The "Note on Course Content" read:

As you know, a course on catastrophe necessarily deals with several topics and sources
that discuss, depict and envision difficult subjects. I recognize that for some members of
the course personal experiences may make a particular topic very hard to process, and
even inappropriate for academic consideration at this time. If you are concerned about our
engagement with a particular topic, issue or source, please come see me and we can
determine an appropriate route forward. Alternate assignments can be arranged if needed,
so please don't hesitate to open this conversation with me. Of course such a discussion
would be confidential.

Bristow said Wednesday that she is not “an expert on the psychological literature,” but she remains
convinced of the “benefit of letting students know when we will be considering material they may
find traumatizing.” She also uses imminent trigger warnings as the need arises.

“We must not assume all students experience our classrooms and the material we teach in the
same way,” she said. “Faculty must recognize that the material they teach lands differently
depending on a student's background, life experiences and ways of being in the world.”

For those professors who teach material that can be “quite traumatic for our students -- in my case
material on the history of people of color, on racial and sexual oppression, on violence and warfare --
reaching out to acknowledge how difficult exposure to certain material can be for our students is an
expression of their humanity and ours,” Bristow said. So trigger warnings and conversations about
possible alternative assignments offer students reassurance that their instructors “care about their
well-being, and suggest we are ready to adjust as needed to ensure they have full access to their
educations, regardless of who they are and where they have been.”

By Colleen Flaherty (/users/colleen-flaherty)

Colleen Flaherty (mailto:colleen.flaherty@insidehighered.com) , Reporter, covers faculty issues for Inside Higher Ed. Prior to joining the
publication in 2012, Colleen was military editor at the Killeen Daily Herald, outside Fort Hood, Texas. Before that, she covered
government and land use issues for the Greenwich Time and Hersam Acorn Newspapers in her home state of Connecticut. After
graduating from McGill University in Montreal in 2005 with a degree in English literature, Colleen taught English and English as a

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15/08/2022, 11:39 New study says trigger warnings are useless. Does that mean they should be abandoned?
second language in public schools in the Bronx, N.Y. She earned her M.S.Ed. from City University of New York Lehman College in 2008
as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows program. 

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