'Trigger warnings' may undermine 'emotional resilience,' Harvard study finds
'Trigger warnings' may undermine 'emotional resilience,'
Harvard study finds
Published on Friday in the Journal of Behavior Therapy
and Experimental
By Bradford Richardson - Monday, July 30, 2018
“Trigger warnings” may do more harm than good, according
to a study by a team of Harvard University psychologists.
Psychiatry, the study found that trigger warnings do not
reduce the anxiety that people experience upon encountering a distressing text.
The alerts even had the opposite effect in some cases,
increasing “perceived emotional vulnerability to trauma,” “anxiety to written
material perceived as harmful” and “belief that trauma survivors are
vulnerable.”
“Trigger warnings do not appear to be conducive to
resilience as measured by any of our metrics,” the authors wrote. “Rather, our
findings indicate that trigger warnings may present nuanced threats to
selective domains of psychological resilience.”
The study was released as college students, professors
and administrators have widely employed trigger warnings on campus to guard
against upsetting materials including the Bible, the works of William
Shakespeare and the U.S. Constitution.
Proponents of trigger warnings say they are necessary to
protect victims of trauma from content that could evoke adverse emotional
reactions. Critics argue that the alerts undermine psychological well-being by
coddling people while posing threats to academic freedom and the mission of the
university.
In the study, researchers tested the effects of trigger
warnings by assigning 270 participants to read 10 passages from classical
literature, five of which contained no distressing material and five of which
contained distressing material, such as depictions of murder.
The participants were divided into two groups.
One group was given a trigger warning before each passage
that read: “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.”
The second group received no trigger warnings.
The study found that participants who received trigger
warnings ended up with more fragile views of what they and others would be
capable of after experiencing trauma.
Participants in the trigger warning group were also more likely
to report greater anxiety levels after reading the passages, but this held true
only among participants who believed that words can cause harm.
“Trigger warnings did not affect anxiety responses to
potentially distressing material in general,” the study found. “However,
trigger warnings may foster a self-fulfilling prophecy that increases anxiety
for those individuals who believe that words can harm them.
“Hence, such warnings may increase acute anxiety by
fostering an expectancy of harm,” the study continued.
The authors concluded that trigger warnings may
“inadvertently undermine some aspects of emotional resilience.”
In a post on Medium, social psychologist Craig Harper
said the study confirms that teaching students “words are akin to violence and
can cause harm, and then giving them trigger warnings to compound that
message,” is a bad idea.
“The data in this study were clear — trigger warnings
increase anticipated vulnerability to experience post-traumatic distress, and
when paired with the belief that words can cause harm, such warnings can
actively increase immediate experiences of anxiety,” Mr. Harper wrote.
Mr. Harper said the findings support the hypothesis
championed by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argued against the use of
trigger warnings in a 2015 essay in The Atlantic.
“In their piece, Lukianoff and Haidt argue how gradual
exposure to ‘triggering’ content has been established as an effective way to
overcome responses to trauma,” Mr. Harper wrote. “Trigger warnings are the antithesis
of this idea.”
Mr. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University,
responded to the study on Twitter, arguing that it provides “direct support”
for his theory.
Jordan B. Peterson, a psychology professor from the
University of Toronto and a frequent higher education critic, also commented on
the study.
“Trigger warnings are precisely as counterproductive as
any clinician worth his or her salt would expect,” Mr. Peterson tweeted.
Mr. Harper said the study is limited by small sample
sizes and the fact that people with post-traumatic stress disorder were
excluded from participating for ethical reasons.
“This study is a relatively small-scale one, and has a
key limitation in that it used non-student sample which excluded those with
actual trauma histories,” he wrote. “If the findings replicate in other
samples, though, this could (and should) have knock-on effects in terms of the
frequency that we use trigger warnings.”
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