Trigger warnings are messages alerting people to content containing themes that could cause distressing emotional reactions. Advocates claim that warnings allow people to prepare themselves and subsequently reduce negative reactions toward content, while critics insist warnings may increase negative interpretations. Here, we investigated (a) the emotional impact of viewing a warning message, (b) if a warning message would increase or decrease participants’ negative evaluations of a set of ambiguous photos, and (c) how participants evaluated overall study participation. We meta-analyzed the results of 5 experiments (N = 1,600) conducted online, and found that trigger warnings did not cause participants to interpret the photos in a more negative manner than participants who were unwarned. However, warned participants experienced a negative anticipatory period prior to photo viewing that did little to mitigate subsequent negative reactions.

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People often have vivid, graphic memories of traumatic events (Levine & Edelstein, 2009). Sometimes those memories are focused closely on one aspect of the event: When a weapon is present at a crime, witnesses often have difficulty remembering any other details (e.g., Fawcett, Russell, Peace, & Christie, 2013). Indeed, people are more likely to remember emotionally salient or central, compared with peripheral, details about negatively arousing events (e.g.

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Following a traumatic experience, people often experience involuntary cognitions—that is, spontaneously occurring thoughts, memories, or images. Although trauma victims commonly experience involuntary memories, they also experience involuntary nonmemories, a subset of which are elaborative (i.e., cognitions about event details that did not actually occur). These cognitions may help to maintain posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology by contributing to an ongoing sense of current threat. However, it is unclear whether trauma-exposed people with PTSD are more prone to elaborative nonmemories about past trauma than healthy, trauma-exposed people. Further, the experience of elaborative nonmemories has largely been overlooked by previous researchers. Our objective in the current study was to address both of these gaps in the literature. A large sample of adults in the United States (N = 393) described recent involuntary cognitions about their most traumatic experience and rated them on various characteristics (e.g., vividness and distress). Participants also completed several measures of psychopathology, including PTSD symptoms. Two independent raters blind to our hypotheses later coded cognition descriptions according to their content. Although memories were predominant, 18.8% of cognitions were nonmemories, which commonly involved imagination of new event details, and were more frequent among probable-PTSD participants than non PTSD participants. Critically, memories and nonmemories were indistinguishable for many phenomenological characteristics, including vividness and associated distress. Our findings suggest that PTSD may be characterized by involuntary elaborative nonmemories that are largely indistinguishable from memories in terms of their phenomenological experience.

Trauma-exposed people commonly exhibit a "memory amplification" effect, endorsing exposure to more traumatic events over time. Studies reporting this phenomenon have typically relied on checklists, where participants read event descriptions and indicate (yes/no) their exposure. We examined whether that approach is vulnerable to response biases and memory errors. In two experiments, participants viewed negative photos and completed an Old-New recognition test. In Experiment 1, participants completed either a photo recognition test or description test-composed of written descriptions of negative photos. In Experiment 2, we measured analogue PTSD symptoms and participants completed the description test twice, 24 hr apart. Those in the description test condition performed worse on the memory test and were more biased to endorse negative photos compared with the photo test condition. Furthermore, this bias to endorse negative photos increased over time and was related to analogue PTSD symptoms. Overall, our findings suggest that test format plays a role in memory amplification.

After trauma people commonly experience intrusive memories and involuntary elaborative cognitions, such as imagined future events. Involuntary elaborative cognitions differ from intrusive memories because they involve the construction of a novel scenario, rather than the retrieval of a specific past event. Presenting multiple, unrelated cues together—compared to isolated cues—might elicit more elaborative cognitions by encouraging the extraction of distinct memory traces to construct a novel event. Conversely, isolated cues might elicit more intrusive memories by encouraging retrieval of a specific memory. We investigated these ideas using a vigilance task consisting of written cues. Participants viewed negative photos and then viewed either no cues, single cues (e.g., knife), or cues presented together as randomly selected triplets (e.g., skull sick hunger). Cues encouraged involuntary cognitions. However, frequency of intrusive memories and involuntary elaborative cognitions did not depend on whether cues were presented singularly or as triplets.

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