Do trigger warnings work?

What does scientific research say about the effectiveness of trigger warnings?

In recent years, sensitivity to all kinds of topics has skyrocketed. Whether it's about sex, race, gender, sexual orientation or any other issue, there are topics that the public prefers to be treated with sensitivity or not at all.

In the last decade, "trigger warnings", a kind of message or warning given before dealing with a subject that may hurt sensitivities, have become very popular. While their purpose is to prevent victims of injustice from reliving a past experience, there are also those who are critical of such warnings.

We will now take a look at whether trigger warnings work. we will see whether trigger warnings workwhat criticisms have been made and how they are related to suffering mental disorders.

Do trigger warnings work to protect people?

In recent years, "trigger warnings" have been spreading in all types of content, both academic and sensitive content warnings have become widespread in all types of content, both academic and entertainment.. These warnings are given before explaining a topic or presenting an event that may hurt sensitivities, since they may represent some kind of violent action against a disadvantaged group, minority, sexual orientation, gender, race or social class.

In principle, the purpose of these ads is to prevent people who have been victims of an injustice and who happen to be represented in the subject matter from remembering their traumatic experience and suffering again. The intention, in itself, is empathetic, wanting anyone who is exposed to that content not to relive something that hurt them and has the right to decide not to be exposed to such material.

However, it has been suggested that these types of ads may actually do more harm than good, hypersensitizing those who were real victims and spreading that fear to people who have never received a real assault or harm.

In addition, more and more people are seeing these types of warnings as a way of overly as a way of overly softening reality and endangering freedom of education and artistic expression.. Making up or directly censoring unpleasant but real content is detrimental to society as a whole.

• You may be interested in, "What is trauma and how does it influence our lives?"

Censorship at the university

Trigger warnings have become very common in North American universitiesespecially in social studies majors such as sociology, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines in this field.

Given society's increased sensitivity and awareness of groups that have been subject to oppression, whether by race, sex, gender, sexual orientation or culture, more and more people are demanding that content taught in higher education come with a prior message warning that it may be offensive to some students.

For example, if a university is teaching forensic psychology, it is quite likely that sexual abuse will be discussed at some point. The content of the course may include real testimonies of women who have been raped or children who have been victims of pedophilia. The trigger warning would be placed before starting the syllabus, with the intention that if there is someone in the classroom who has been a victim of these crimes, he or she can mentally prepare for the syllabus. mentally prepare themselves for the subject matter or, directly, have the option of not wanting to see it..

To understand it in a better way. Instead of talking about social sciences, let's talk about a medical discipline such as surgery. Let's imagine that we have a professor who is going to explain how to perform a Heart operation but, before teaching the procedure, he shows the "trigger warning" that blood, viscera and sharp objects are going to be seen. Thus gives the option to those who are sensitive to these stimuli to leave the class while the operation is being taught.. How will those who leave the class learn to operate if they avoid this content?

The problem with this is that while one must empathize with and protect people who have been victims of some kind of injustice or violation of their rights, one must also prepare college students as people to deal with a real world, where injustices occur whether or not they have studied them in class.

In other words, it is not very educational to give students the option of not studying a certain content because they find it offensive. Moreover, offense is something extremely subjective, which should not be considered as a solid argument to censor knowledge and debate.

Is it possible to confront racism without knowing what it is? Is it possible to fight for gender equality without knowing about the oppression of women? These issues must be studied in order to carry out a real struggle to improve the conditions of the entire population.. Not studying them prevents us from recognizing the real injustice and fighting against it.

Content warnings work, but badly

Trigger warnings have become truly controversial, especially in the field of clinical psychology. It has been suggested that far from protecting the mental health of victims of injustice, the mental health of people who, despite not having been victims, learn to have an excessive fear of certain subjects, is damaged.

Fear and, consequently, phobias, have an important social component. They are aspects that can be acquired without having had a traumatic experience, simply by listening to someone talking about an event, exaggerating its seriousness and warning everyone to avoid it. To understand this, if we were told as children that dogs bite and that we should be afraid of them, even if they never hurt us, we can end up having a real phobia of them. Sometimes it is the words that hurt us.

The same would be true for trigger warnings. A content that, perhaps, seen without prior warning does not have to be stressful for us although it may be a bit unpleasant, in case we are warned that it may bother us, we may exaggerate its degree of offense. We will have become aware that what we are going to see is something that we will not like and, consequently, it offends us.

This question has been tried to be studied scientifically, having the case of the experiment carried out by Benjamin Bellet, Payton Jones, and Richard McNally.. These researchers divided a sample of 270 American subjects into two groups, and each was assigned to read a series of ten passages from works of all times. Five of these passages contained no potentially objectionable material, while the other five did, such as a depiction of murder or rape.

One group was the control group, in which before each passage they were given no warning that what they were about to read would leave a bad taste in their mouths.. The other was the group exposed to "trigger warnings," and before each passage they were presented with a warning like the following:

NOTICE. The passage you are about to read contains disturbing material and may cause an anxiety response, especially in those who may have a history of trauma.

The degree of anxiety was measured before and after the ten passages were read.. In this way the researchers had a baseline measure of how upset the participants were as normal and how upset they were after reading the passages, both with and without a warning or trigger warning. The researchers found that the participants who had been warned reported that they or others might be bothered by what they had read much more than those who had not been warned, despite having read the same passages.

These findings, although it is true that more studies would be needed to study this phenomenon in depth, allow us to understand that the way in which the information to be received is treated influences how it is perceived. If we receive a warning that what we are going to be told is going to offend us, it is quite likely that it will end up offending us or that we will see it in a less objective way than we would if we were not given that warning.

Impact on mental health

It has been suggested that trigger warnings can have a negative impact on the health of the population, even those who have not been warned.It has been suggested that trigger warnings can have a negative impact on the health of the population, even those who have not been victims of a traumatic event. Receiving a warning of what is going to be seen may be unpleasant can awaken anticipatory anxiety, causing the person to suffer for something that he/she does not know for sure if it can really bother him/her. That is, without even having seen if the message is offensive, they may already feel offended.

The idea that words or images can trigger unpleasant memories of a past trauma has been studied since World War I, when psychiatrists began to study the idea that the words or images can trigger unpleasant memories of a past trauma.when psychiatrists began treating soldiers who exhibited symptoms of what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The concept of trigger warnings is very much based on this idea, since they are considered as stimuli that can awaken flashbacks or unpleasant memories.

The discomfort of people suffering from anxiety or trauma-related disorders, such as PTSD, is real. When an anxiogenic stimulus is presented, they manifest a series of really painful symptoms whose cause is directly linked to the traumatic experience and having seen an element that has reminded them of that pain. These are mental disorders that require professional help. The problem is that the use of trigger warnings is just the antithesis of the way trigger warnings work. the antithesis of how therapies for anxiety disorders work..

The quintessential therapy for this type of disorder is exposure therapy. The individual who manifests a heightened response to the stressful stimulus is progressively habituated to it through exposure. For example, a person suffering from arachnophobia, in order to overcome his phobia, will be presented with different situations in therapy to get used to spiders.

At first, the individual will be presented with images of spiders, then spider dolls, later he will be asked to approach a spider in a box and, finally, he will be able to touch one, all in several sessions. Thus, in exposure therapy the individual reduces his anxiety by habituating to the anxiogenic stimulus. At first it will not be easy, and it may never cease to seem an unpleasant stimulus, but he will be able to be closer to that which previously generated a very high stressful response.

The problem with trigger warnings is that they do exactly what exposure therapy tries to prevent: they encourage avoidance behaviors.: encouraging avoidance behaviors. By giving the individual the option of not being exposed to that which, supposedly, may cause him/her discomfort, he/she is being motivated to avoid by all means an annoying information. This will make the person unable to be around people who talk about the feared topic, complain that he or she is offended by something very minor, or threaten to denounce anyone who suggests the feared topic.

Conclusion

A society in which there is greater awareness of injustices is a more egalitarian society. Knowing that not everyone enjoys the same rights and that they suffer violations of those rights is the best way to become aware that change is needed and to participate more actively in the struggle for equality.

The problem comes when, far from raising awareness, we try to avoid any message that might seem the least bit unpleasant. Doing so only makes people not know what to deal with, and they feel uncomfortable about it.and feel uncomfortable for any small comment made without bad intentions.

Trigger warnings work badly. Far from taking care of the mental health of the most vulnerable people, what it does is to make them even more sensitive, in addition to making people who have no reason to have lived a traumatic experience end up acquiring sensitivity by vicarious learning. The best way to treat a trauma, phobia or fear of the unknown is through controlled exposure in a therapeutic context, the opposite being totally counterproductive.

Bibliographical references:

• Bellet, B. W., Jones, P. J., & McNally, R. J. (2018). Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. doi: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.07.002.
• Jones, P. J., Bellet, B. W., & McNally, R. J. (2020). Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories. Clinical Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620921341