Table of Contents
What is a Trigger Warning?
A trigger warning is a verbal or written warning that the following content of a program, show, or lecture may be disturbing to some people. Trigger warnings are often given before graphic or violent videos or images are shown in order to give viewers a chance to choose to turn off the program, look away briefly, or prepare themselves mentally for what they are about to view.
Trigger warnings have been used on television for decades, especially on news programs, but recently they have come under scrutiny due to increased use in new spaces like college lectures and for new topics such as sex, foul language and historical genocides.
In 2016, NPR did a survey which found that over half of all college professors in the United States (51%) were using trigger warnings in their classrooms. Trigger warnings were usually simply verbal and the vast majority voluntary. Less than 2% of the respondents said their university had a policy requiring a trigger warning for any content.
While it is understandable that lecture content covering the holocaust or rape may make a person feel terrible, especially if they have experience or connection with the triggering content, many feel that putting warnings on these types of topics actually leads to a more fragile individual who can not deal with difficult issues. But to what extent does research back up this claim of trigger warnings making people weak?
Research on Trigger Warnings
Research on trigger warnings has actually been covered in a variety of contexts and has fairly consistent results. While individual reactivity is always variable, in general, trigger warnings increase emotional response to content.
While it may seem counterintuitive, rather than reducing emotional response by giving sensitive students a chance to prepare themselves for what they are going to see, the research shows that many trigger warnings actually increase emotional reactions to content by focusing on and heightening the brain’s response to stressful topics. By bringing focus to the topic and suggesting that people may respond poorly, this actually primes the brain to react poorly.
A recent study gave half of their participants a trigger warning before reading a disturbing text describing violence and the other half did not. The trigger warning read as follows:
“TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma.” (Bellet et al.)
On average, the participants who received this trigger warning rated the material as more anxiety inducing than those who received no trigger warnings. This finding suggests that telling someone that something may make them anxious is more likely to make them anxious rather than just letting them experience the text naturally.
This is the same mechanism that controls the nocebo effect, the opposite negative version of the better known placebo effect. Nocebo effects are most notable in the medical field where patients who are told their side effects are more likely to experience those side effects.
Priming brain pathways to fire makes them more likely to fire. This is why coaches tell athletes to visualize hitting the ball, why advertising creates a sense of familiarity with a brand, and why students study before tests to keep information fresh in their memory.
However, an important drawback of this research was that it excluded participants with a history of trauma. So while this study may show that trigger warnings can increase the emotional salience of content for the average person, it does nothing to explain how trigger warnings affect those who have suffered a related trauma.
Research done earlier this year sought to solve that gap by comparing the responses of trauma survivors to the average person when given trigger warnings. In this study, they had students read a disturbing passage of literature describing a sexual assault and compared how the average person responded when compared with an actual victim of trauma who is experiencing symptoms of PTSD.
Surprisingly the results showed that “Those with higher PTSD scores to start did not experience more distress over time.” (Kimble et al.) Despite it being well known that there are some triggers that can cause a person with PTSD to have severe emotional reactions, the average person with PTSD is far more resilient than they are often given credit and seem to be able to handle reading most content as well as any other student.
It is important to note that this study did not cover audio or visual content which may be more traumatizing due to the more direct connections between sensory stimuli and emotional reaction vs. simply reading about an event.
Should Teachers Use Trigger Warnings?
Upon looking at this research, it seems that trigger warnings generally do more harm than good. However, it is important to not oversimplify results or generalize those results to be valid for all students who have experienced trauma.
Some students may have more traumatic experiences than others and some may react more distressed when exposed to triggers than other students. Trigger warnings often simply act as a way to quickly mention what will be shown or read just in case there is anyone who has a serious issue.
None of the professors from the NPR survey who used trigger warnings had ever had a student try to get out of an assignment, but simply might excuse themselves from the room for a few minutes. In the rare event that a student does have a trauma with a specific topic, when they see or hear a trigger warning they can speak with the teacher and come up with a plan to either read or watch in private or with professional support depending on their needs.
The studies above all used very serious and emotionally evocative vocabulary and all caps which makes the warning more powerful and may psych the students out more than a more casual warning. The professors surveyed in the NPR study generally used far less emotionally impactful phrasing and just mentioned what would be shown as a “heads up” rather than describing it as disturbing or offensive outright.
Simply stating the content that will be viewed or read in a factual and unemotional way allows for those who have serious issues to be prepared or make other arrangements but does not affect the rest of the class with highly emotional wording. This type of trigger warning would be significantly less problematic than the types used in the studies.
Many teachers still feel that trigger warnings allow students to opt out of difficult to discuss topics rather than learn how to manage their emotions and maturely discuss emotional topics. This can often be the case when trigger warnings are overused or used for topics where a strong negative reaction is normal and healthy such as the holocaust.
Students who cry or in other ways become upset when viewing or reading this type of content should be validated and told that their reaction is not only normal, but shows that they are a good, thoughtful, and compassionate human. There is an idea that trigger warnings make students weak, but showing emotions should not be viewed as weak.
Some teachers suggest that rather than viewing these emotional reactions as bad, they actually help to build up resilience and develop “antifragility” in the students so that they are less reactive in the future. This seems true from what we know about how the brain responds to repeated stimuli.
When a person eats a big slice of chocolate the first time, it is intensely delicious, but the second, third, and fourth slice slowly lose their emotional power. Similarly, a person who has not experienced public nudity such as at a public bath or sauna may be very shocked and emotional when confronted with the nudity, but those who have experienced it many times will not be bothered by the nudity and will consider it normal after enough experience.
The more the brain experiences anything, the less emotionally salient it becomes. So those that say that students who are not exposed to these types of topics will be more fragile have a strong scientific basis.
However, not all topics really need desensitization. Do students really need to be desensitized to violence, rape, and gore?
It is wrong to think that it is strength to not feel emotional when discussing these powerful topics. Feeling sadness or pain when seeing others suffer is compassion, not weakness.
Sometimes, however, it may be useful for students to see the violence of the past. For example, when discussing the slave trade, images of mistreated, maimed, and mutilated people can help bring to shocking life the dull emotionless textbook explanation.
In a similar vein, this is exactly why smoking packets often include images of disgustingly diseased lungs to discourage future smoking. People who see those images are shocked and may even be triggered if a relative has died from lung disease, but this negative emotion will make it less likely that they will pick up the habit themselves and so the negative emotions actually have a positive effect.
In these cases, the heightened emotional shock is not just a byproduct of learning, but specifically the purpose of the emotional content. In some cases however, the violence, gore, or sexual content may simply be incidental and not crucial for learning.
In cases where the emotional shock is not the purpose of the learning or when the teacher knows that they have a student who has a trauma related to their topic, a casual trigger warning may still be beneficial to let those with a more sensitive disposition avoid pointless disgust or sadness from something that won’t help them learn anything.
For example, a science class may be watching a nature documentary where animals hunt one another. While seeing nature in action can absolutely help students to visualize concepts from their textbook better, a quick and casual “Those with weak stomachs might want to look away now” before the prey is actually killed really does not impact their learning. There is no reason why most people should be desensitized to the death of animals, so this is a case where the trigger warning would be positive.
Conclusion
The research shows that many of the types of trigger warnings used today actually have a surprising opposite effect than their intention. Rather than giving students time to mentally prepare, this increased focus on the negative actually increases the emotional reactivity of the topic when given a trigger warning.
While the debate of what topics are beneficial and which are pointlessly triggering will continue to rage, this research clarifies how the use of trigger warnings needs to change. Sometimes an increased emotionality is normal when discussing difficult topics, and sometimes that negativity is actually the whole point.
In the end, teachers will have to make their own decisions on what content needs to be struggled through and which content deserves a trigger warning. However, it is clear that strong, formal, and emotionally charged trigger warnings actually have a negative effect on emotionality and should be avoided in favor of more casual and verbal trigger warnings.
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References
Bellet, Benjamin W., et al. “Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead.” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, vol. 61, 2018, pp. 134–141., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.07.002.
Kimble, Matthew, et al. “Students Responses to Differing Trigger Warnings: A Replication and Extension.” Journal of American College Health, 2022, pp. 1–4., https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2022.2098038.
