Trigger warnings and resilience in college students: A preregistered replication and extension.

Abstract

Trigger warnings notify people that content they are about to engage with may result in adverse emotional consequences. An experiment by Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018) indicated that trigger warnings increased the extent to which trauma-naïve crowd-sourced participants see themselves and others as emotionally vulnerable to potential future traumas but did not have a significant main effect on anxiety responses to distressing literature passages. However, they did increase anxiety responses for participants who strongly believed that words can harm. In this article, we present a preregistered replication of this study in a college student sample, using Bayesian statistics to estimate the success of each effect’s replication. We found strong evidence that none of the previously significant effects replicated. However, we found substantial evidence that trigger warnings’ previously nonsignificant main effect of increasing anxiety responses to distressing content was genuine, albeit small. Interpretation of the findings, implications, and future directions are discussed.

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

“…Recent research on trigger warnings can importantly inform or perhaps even settle some of these debates. Trigger warnings are unhelpful for trauma survivors, college students, trauma-naïve individuals, and mixed groups of participants (Bellet et al, 2018;Bellet et al, 2019, Bridgland et al, 2019Sanson et al, 2019). Given this consistent conclusion, we find no evidence-based reason for educators, administrators, or clinicians to use trigger warnings.…”

“…One possibility is that these effects were unique to the trigger-warning naïve (trauma-naïve), crowd-sourced, older sample used by Bellet et al (2018). However, given that these effects originally had a small effect size and did not replicate in larger samples of college students (Bellet et al, 2019) or trauma survivors (present study), the original results may have been a false positive.…”

“…Critics of recent trigger warning research have suggested the plausible hypothesis that whereas trigger warnings may not be helpful for college students generally (e.g., Bellet et al, 2019) or even for trauma survivors generally, they may be helpful for more specific subpopulations. For instance, it is possible that trigger warnings are only helpful for (1) individuals with clinical-level PTSD symptoms or (2) individuals who have received a diagnosis of PTSD.…”

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

“…Critics of recent trigger warning research have suggested the plausible hypothesis that although trigger warnings may not be helpful for college students generally (e.g., Bellet et al, 2020) or even for trauma survivors generally, they may be helpful for more specific subpopulations. For instance, it is possible that trigger warnings are helpful only for (a) individuals with clinical-level PTSD symptoms or (b) individuals who have received a diagnosis of PTSD.…”

“…Since this original study, the scientific literature has quickly expanded. Bellet et al (2020) 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.…”