This article is BRUTAL and will SHOCK YOU !

If you were expecting scenes of a VIOLENT and SHOCKING nature... I'm afraid you'll likely be disappointed. I lied. But with good reason...

"Trigger warnings are, at best, trivially helpful," writes a research team led by psychologist Mevagh Sanson of the University of Waikato. The paper finds they "have no effect, or might even work slightly in the direction of causing harm." 

All the experiments were structured similarly. Participants first reported their current emotional state to create a baseline. Then they either read a story, or watched a video, about a disturbing topic such as child abuse, murder, and physical domestic abuse. Half of them saw trigger warnings before being exposed to the disquieting material, and half did not. Examples included "TRIGGER WARNING: The following story contains violence and death" and "TRIGGER WARNING: The following video may contain graphic footage. You may find this content disturbing."

I don't know about you, but that just usually inflames my sense of morbid curiosity...

"People who saw trigger warnings, compared to people who did not, judged material to be similarly negative, felt similarly negative, experienced similarly frequent intrusive thoughts and avoidance, and comprehended subsequent material similarly well," the researchers report.

There's something ineffably obnoxious about trigger warnings. I mean, if I'm going to write about something particularly gruesome or disturbing in some way, I consider it only polite to warn people. In turn, I don't particularly want to see acts of Nazi bestiality or whatever other horrors are out there, so warning people just seems like common bloody sense. Yet prefix it with "trigger warning", or worse, "TRIGGER WARNING", and I feel like a massive douche (thus making the phrase itself a trigger warning, which is pleasingly fractal). If people were just allowed to give perfectly sensible warnings without drawing attention to it, no-one would care. There certainly wouldn't be academic studies about it.

As I've previously ranted about extensively, there's a difference between knowledge, belief, and behaviour. Knowing what's coming isn't likely to change my feelings about it when it happens (unless perhaps I embark on a specific course of actions designed to do so, e.g. reflecting on it very deeply). Instead it lets me select what I want to see so I can avoid being grossed out or angered or whatever. These kinds of warnings are very similar to those on TV about sports events scores : I won't be able to brace myself by knowing what's coming, I'll just choose not to view it at all. If I cared about sports, that is.

Finally, the inevitable question is whether they should be used in universities. Well, yeah, of course they should. We shouldn't spare people's feelings when there's a need to discuss the various horrors of the past, but there's equally no reason to ram grotesque imagery down people's throats either. Warnings don't have to be as blunt as the hilarious, "contains scenes of extended mild peril" as found on some movie trailers. Most history books don't start by describing the lurid details of Aztec sacrifices, they build up to it. It ought to be bloomin' obvious to anyone if and when they should stop reading, and it's their own damn fault if they don't. Continuously warning people about every single instance of slight inconvenience - yeah, that's stupid. Giving them a quick overall heads-up at the start... well what's wrong with that ?

Trigger Warnings Do Not Work, New Study Finds

Trigger warnings-those alerts provided to college students in advance of potentially disturbing material-have prompted an intense philosophical and ideological debate. But do they actually achieve their stated goal of reducing emotional distress when dealing with sensitive subjects? New research from New Zealand comes to a firm conclusion: They do not.