A recent study in behavior therapy explored the relationship between arousal warnings and behavior related to negative stimuli. The study concluded that there is no evidence to assume that when presented with a trigger warning, people choose to avoid negative stimuli, and trigger warnings did not result in people pausing to prepare emotionally. The results may further lead to future research to examine the benefits of trigger warnings and whether there are more beneficial alternative tools to help people with trauma navigate unexpected triggers.
Trigger warnings are intended to prepare those who consume content that an upcoming topic may trigger memories of past trauma and potentially cause someone to experience traumatic events again. Therefore, one response to a trigger warning is to avoid the trigger content.
However, previous research on avoidance of negative stimuli and trauma has not always supported avoidance as a beneficial behavior for trauma healing. Furthermore, research has revealed that when people see a trigger warning, their emotional distress is not reduced if they continue to consume the content after the warning.
The research team tried to clarify the consequences of activation warnings; investigated whether trigger warnings cause people to avoid negative stimuli. Additionally, they were curious whether trigger warnings cause people to pause and take time to prepare emotionally.
The 199 participants were obtained through Flinders University, Australia. The sample was 70% white. Participants performed various tasks related to the study questions. First, they watched 8 minutes of a movie featuring a violent sexual assault; they ranked this scene according to how distressing they found it.
Next, half of the group of participants looked at still images that were preceded by a trigger warning that read: “Warning: The image you are about to view contains disturbing content that may be distressing.” The remaining half in the control condition have just been instructed that the next images would appear on the next screen when they were ready.
Once an image appeared, they could click “stop viewing” to return to a blank screen. Following these experiences, they conducted various assessments that collected information about their traumatic experiences, coping strategies, and avoidance behaviors.
Once the results were analyzed, it became clear that triggering warnings did not result in higher rates of avoidance behavior. Only 12% of the group of participants chose to cover images. This was true regardless of anxiety levels or previous trauma related to the sexual assault. Furthermore, participants, on average, did not spend more time on the activation warning screens than they did in the control conditions.
Sometimes the opposite was true; people spent more time in the control condition at the instruction screen than those who received the activation warning. Furthermore, trigger warnings did not decrease image distress, providing no evidence that trigger warning helped participants prepare for difficult images.
The research team acknowledges that trauma is complex and a limitation of their study are research-related limitations. There may be other research methodologies that obtain different results. They also found avoidance rates so low that future research may be needed.
The researchers acknowledge that trigger warnings seem valuable, but are concerned that they could become a “sticky fix.” They conclude by saying that “at a more macro level, continued beliefs about the benefits of trigger warnings could result in reduced efforts by policymakers or institutions to find effective mental health support strategies, because trigger warnings Triggers can be considered one of those approaches that is already in use.
The study, “Something Distressing This Way Comes: The Effects of Trigger Warnings on Avoidance Behaviors in an Analog Trauma Task”, was written by Victoria Bridgland and Melanie Takarangi.
