The characteristics of the meta analysis were largely focused on the general public and attempts to limit anxiety in that domain. But I think they forgot an entire other application: NSFL warnings.
Whenever I see NSFL I ABSOLUTELY avoid clicking, I even stop reading, and that has greatly improved my peace of mind. Learned that the hard way during the early internet: I've accidentally seen way too many horrific things I wont even tangentially mention to last me 1000 liftimes. Sure there is an anticipatory impact, but NSFL works for me!
It seems like one message here is that more moderation is needed if anticipation has similar impact as the actual content.
> One possibility is that most people are not skilled at emotional preparation (e.g., reappraising emotional content or using coping strategies). Thus, the uncomfortable anticipatory period is unlikely to reflect any form of helpful action. This conclusion is supported by Bridgland et al. (2021) who asked participants to explain what they would do when they came across a trigger warning; only a minority of participants mentioned some form of approach coping strategy (e.g., reappraisal strategies, such as reminding themselves to focus on non-emotional aspects of the situation; Shiota & Levenson, 2009). Indeed, trigger warnings (including those used in the present studies) typically warn people about the distressing reactions they may have, but do not explain how to reduce these reactions.
Basically, content warnings aren’t useful on their own without additional therapeutic training, which makes sense. “Something bad is about to happen” isn’t useful if you don’t have the means or experience to prepare for it.
The warnings don’t help when people’s curiosity (morbid, compulsive, or otherwise) has not been counteracted by learned experience (or tools via therapy) that they don’t like it or it doesn’t help them.
The warnings are generally not generic (aka ‘bad stuff here’), they’re usually quite descriptive of what category it covers. Far more than a NSFL warning for sure!
If someone keeps going, it’s not because they did so accidentally. They either thought it was going to be fine and they could handle it (and most can), or couldn’t stop themselves even if they knew it was going to be bad.
This is where they therapy side would be interesting to understand. Everyone is going to need a different response plan. Granted, many will be similar, but how do you teach someone to prepare?
Effects on the rest of us matter as well, but shouldn't be considered the whole story.
Some years back my mom was getting treated for a brain tumor. It was a glioblastoma, and as one of her surgeons explained, "This is the thing you will die from." Median survival time, 14 months.
I was very involved in her care and it was draining. She was still fighting hard at that point, but we knew that a moment would come when we'd have to decide to stop treatment. So when I saw that a local theater was having a triple feature with one of my favorite directors, Edgar Wright, I immediately bought tickets. At last, a light and fun evening.
What I had forgotten in the years since I had seen it was that in Shaun of the Dead, a zombie rom-com I adored, there is a scene where the protagonist's mom gets bitten. That protagonist, played by Simon Pegg, struggles with what to do. When his mom turns into a zombie, he is forced to shoot her. At that point I was about a month away from having to pull the plug on my own mom, and the scene was just devastating. I had to leave the theater. A decade later I've still not been able to watch the film.
I should be clear here: I'm not saying Shaun of the Dead should have had a content warning. I had seen it! And I think that sort of need is better served by things like https://www.doesthedogdie.com/ . But I am saying that it was a profoundly shitty experience. In the same way I'm going to avoid literally stepping on somebody's toes (because that hurts!) I'm going to avoid retraumatizing somebody when I can.
I think people already do that pretty naturally with things that are widely seen as disturbing. E.g., I was visiting a friend and went to pick up a textbook on his coffee table. He warned me not to open it, as it belonged to his brother in law who was studying to be a hand surgeon. I was grateful for that warning, as I can't unsee that stuff. To me content warnings are just extending that courtesy to less common horrors.
On the other hand I'm convinced there are things that are universally NSFL for everyone and I believe that the parent comment is geared in that direction.
The meta-analysis seems to include only papers that deal with the first kind of trigger:
" The warning, as conceptualized by the authors of the relevant publication, was intended to notify participants that forthcoming content may trigger memories or emotions relevant to past experiences."
Story tags there serve two important purposes: so you can find what you want to read, and not read that which you definitely do not.
The trouble with NSFW is that it covers things you want to seek out, e.g porn, but also things you might want to avoid, e.g war pictures.
The former are meant for people that either actively avoid watching gore/porn, or who generally wouldn't mind but are in public/at work and want to avoid embarassment.
The latter (trigger warnings) were invented by relatively sheltered and emotionally unhealthy teens on Tumblr, many of whom incorrectly self-diagnose with PTSD and other ailments. It became more prevalent in the 2010s as these teens grew up and got jobs and media influence. It was far more of a way to signal in-group membership, than an actual scientific practice. People who didn't include trigger warnings could get criticized (and occasionally harassed) pretty hard.
It's the same as the TikTokers who say "k-word" instead of "kill", not to protect people's feelings, but to avoid TikTok's heavy content moderation. If influencers or corporations start saying "k-word" outside of TikTok in the future, you can assume it has more to do with immaturity (or the horribly-named "virtue signalling" concept, which is really just in-group signalling) than with any empirical attempt to reduce mental health impacts.
language politics of whether trauma is a "disability" aside, the existence of a meta-analysis over studies which purport to study whether a disability aid works by using it with people who do not have that disability is saddening
some other limitations the i don't see the authors comment on (though i haven't read thoroughly so happy to be corrected): - the effect of different kinds of content warnings isn't discussed (some interesting dimensions are specificity and prominence) - the fact that almost all of the studies use self-reported anxiety scales, and thus it is unclear whether content warnings increase anticipatory anxiety or increase self-reported anticipatory anxiety
like with most accessibility aids the interesting questions are not "does it help". they're "who do different forms of the aid help or harm" and "morally, when should we expect or even enforce a particular level of implementation"
looking at how other accessibility aids work is helpful for answering some of these questions. to take the classic university classroom example, you could for example look at the way some departments handle students who aren't able to take lecture notes. a student can request note taking accommodation for a particular class, and then a peer volunteer (or as a fallback university employee) will take notes for that student. just like that, we don't need to have a national debate about whether it is helpful or harmful if all university professors are forced to provide note taking services for all of their students.
anyway, i guess i'm upset because i'm tired of the ongoing massive debate and apparently research industry that completely misses the point.
The reason is because there seems to be a standardized list of 'real' triggers that people agree on, and I'm often triggered by depictions of loving families. Which nobody is ever going to warn for. I also have major disassociation and emotional blunting, so I have no idea what makes violence or sexual related cross the line into needing a warning. So ironically, spaces that insist heavily on trigger warnings are hard for me to exist in as a person with PTSD without breaking the norms. It's hard not to feel there are 'right' and 'wrong' triggers.
1.) Nobody would want to pay for a central organization/group to make the ontology or labeling system. That would be a complex undertaking that would require a substantial amount of domain knowledge, not something that could be thrown together by volunteers.
2.) Keeping it up to date would require disclosure from people with PTSD to said central group and for various reasons a lot of us wouldn't be comfortable with that.
It's not envy. It's a trigger because one of the women who abused me was really into socially appearing to be a good mother and therefore that was part of the 'act' and I was forced into acting like part of those happy families. So I tense and have emotional reactions because my brain is fucked up and therefore reads the depictions as abusive.
(I have a great deal of envy - I'm working on it - but that means I definitely know the difference!)
Nobody should be arguing against any kind of trigger warning in those spaces. If someone is pushing back, they should be removed from the space -- They're actively working against the point of the space.
>Which nobody is ever going to warn for.
I will now in those kinds of spaces.
Anecdotally I've also seen trigger warnings for father's day and mother's day, which seems like a trend in this direction.
>I have no idea what makes violence or sexual related cross the line into needing a warning
Well, nobody can know for sure :) Many of us have to guess when we put the trigger warning in, more so if we can't relate to the trigger. That can be much harder when you're dissociative but it's hard in general.
What's helped me is to mentally flag any potentially unwanted contact, physical or verbal, and find the best trigger warning that captures the text. Sometimes that means leaving a warning for just that, unwanted contact -- Sometimes I can refine that further to a kind of abuse, e.g. sexual or physical abuse.
In my experience, the people who are most zealous about enforcing content warnings are people who like the social power it gives them over others and who lash out when they're made uncomfortable, and that's not acceptable. Being uncomfortable or triggered is obviously fine and you can't control that, but that doesn't give us the right to lash out at others or expect people to just 'know' what might set us off.
What does “triggered” actually mean, specifically?
Regardless, that seems like a serious mental health issue.
You are responsible for and in control of your own emotions. If you don’t feel that’s true, you need to spend more time in serious therapy, not demanding “trigger” warnings.
I mean 'triggered' in the PTSD sense of the term since I have PTSD. I'm nominally the population served by trigger warnings, but I find the cultural practices around them not helpful because they assume a common experience when PTSD triggers are very personal and in addition trigger warnings are accompanied by a 'walk on eggshells' culture which clashes with the desensitivity/disassociation that also accommodates PTSD.
And I am in therapy, thanks. You should probably take some reading comprehension classes though.
Given a person who is triggered by a specific type of content do they avoid things labeled with that specific type of content more than if it was unlabeled? It’s one of those things that seems so obviously true when you talk to people.
To me this study is actually huge to support trigger warnings and content labels. They don’t cause people across a population overall to avoid the content, they act as a positive signal for people who are looking for it (like R rating on horror movies), and they have no effect on the experience — it makes the response no worse and doesn’t spoil it for people who want it.
I feel like I'm not asking for much here. :(
We can’t possibly account for every possible form of extreme emotional fragility, nor is it our responsibility to account for it.
The attempt to shift that responsibility to speakers is itself just a form of social aggression, status-seeking and control.
So yes, it is asking for too much.
I get what you are getting at, but I am curious how much of that profile should be fleshed out in your view?
- one important dimension of the "should" in this question is how much choice the viewer of the media has in viewing the media. this is part of why schools are such a big part of the conversation about content warnings, because the students can't just choose to opt out of readings without consequences
- another important dimension is the delivery platform and audience size. sometimes you can just ask the person who made or is showing you the thing about some very specific content you'd like to avoid or be prepared for, so specifying everything isn't as important there. otoh, if you're a giant media property with millions of viewers, maybe the cost/benefit of listing exactly when/where particular things happen looks a little better
- depending on platform, lots of detail could be more or less practical. e.g. if you're making a web page it's easy to say "content warnings: click for details > detailsdetailsdetails click for more details > detaileddetailsdetaileddetails", which easily allows the viewer to choose how much detail they want rather than picking for them, but that can be harder to pull off in other formats
- if you find this topic interesting, consider looking for literature on topics like accessibility and disability justice (not sure i could recommend a particular one since i've formed my views on this sort of thing piecemeal and through community). there is a lot of interesting moral thought on the subject of "ok so this thing is helpful to some people sometimes, sooo how much should we actually do it?"
I always thought a true trigger warning, the kind that I really like, are for example movies warning when there'd be things like gore and etc that I don't like to watch. I like it because I get a physically ill reaction that will ruin my night if i see fictionalized gore. I wish I didn't, but I do, so it goes. But as you've said I've seen "trigger warning" mean literally putting the words "trigger warning" on the top of a text post which seems pointless, or, saying it before telling a story, which also seems pointless.
No, no, that one's simple: "fascism" means anything that isn't anarchism. And "anarchism" means anything that isn't fascism. This is definitely a coherent and useful set of terminology.
I'd like to share a personal annecdote that I think may be instructive to people who have never found trigger warnings to be useful.
Once a friend of mine wanted to show me a visual novel. They skipped the trigger warning at the beginning because they felt it was spoilery. We played through the whole thing in one night; about halfway through the story (given the path I took), we were lead to believe a character committed suicide (and that it may be because you rejected them romantically), and then at the end it's revealed they were literally trolling you.
I had fairly recently gotten out of a traumatic relationship with someone suicidal. When I would try to leave the relationship, they would threaten to kill themselves. Sometimes they would beg me to kill them. Needless to say, suicide was a difficult topic for me to engage with in an immersive, RPG-like setting.
I felt blindsided & stopped having a good time after I was lead to believe the character took their life. I was uncomfortable but didn't know what to do but keep playing. When I finished the game and the twist was revealed, I didn't feel pathos. I think some of you may relate to the moment you realized the show Lost was never going to resolve the mysteries it was putting forth, that the show runners were throwing things out to grab your attention with no plan to resolve them; like my emotions had been manipulated in a cheap way to engage me. I felt toyed with.
I think if I had had the trigger warnings, I would've been able to mentally prepare myself. Or I'd have the opportunity to decide I didn't want to play.
I want to make informed choices about the media I consume and how I consume it. Make of that what you will.
(This was all many years ago & I'm doing well.)
I've never really found them to be spoilery though? So perhaps I'm the wrong person to ask.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...
> Ms Kearsley said it was 'commonsense' to question the game's emotional impact but recording a verdict of suicide, she said: "We can make no direct link between Ben's death and his online gaming. Ben was a young man who potentially had a number of complexities."
That's terrible about the 12 year old boy. I would say DDLC is a powerful and compelling piece of art that subverts & interrogates it's own genre and reveals the flaws of that genre, and I'm certainly not advocating for people not to make really challenging art like that. I wish things could have been different for that boy, but I'm not sure that's something better trigger warnings would solve.
<< I want to make informed choices about the media I consume and how I consume it.
That is a reasonable statement and even expectation on the surface. I might accept it as rationale for graphic movies and so on, but your example is visual novel, where you choose your own adventure - a form of media that is almost guaranteed to put you in unusual and unexpected situations? Unless you play a game built around satire of everyday life ( say.. Stanley Parable ), is it not expected to expect unexpected including some questionable predicaments?
But more to my real point, should art imitate life or should it be a 'safified' version of it? I can absolutely relate to seeing something you should not see ( my buddy dared/forced me to watch "Hostel" with him and it was not a pleasant experience and have stumbled onto some real bad stuff on the 90s net - I completely buy it can mess you up if you are not mentally prepared ).
In your example, how would you know this could have been the outcome without having gone through it? It seems like catch 22. Trigger warning would give you only a very general idea.
I'm not entirely sure I've understood your objection properly, but I'll try to address your questions.
Yeah it's expected that I'll be put in unusual situations, no I don't expect authors to anticipate each trauma I could possibly have, but surely the very obvious ones can be covered.
Should art immitate life or be safe? Neither and both, there's plenty of room in this world for the most gritty horror movie and for Blue's Clues.
How could I have known it was the outcome? The trigger warning was as specific as it needed to be - "TW: Suicide" is plenty.
ETA: The general vibe I'm getting here is you're asking, "where do you draw the line?", as if this were a slippery slope. The answer is, it's a matter of taste and judgement. It's not any less tractable then the question, when do you decide a work of art is done?
Naturally this opens up the observation that, if it's about judgment, one could decide to include no trigger warnings, like my friend did when presenting the game to me. And sure, I'm not saying that's invalid. More that its bad taste, and I've elaborated as to why I feel that way.
So far players really likes the fact that the system exists and that they can choose to skip or see the content. It's all about being warned anf having the choice.
People seem to be hung up on the new term "trigger warning" when we've had content warnings since time immemorial.
Nobody seems to be writing the articles on "efficacy" of movie ratings, or putting "18+" labels on content. We, as a society, understand that not all content is suitable for all audiences... when it comes to sex, and sex only, it seems.
Then there's the issue of trust. Any source that gives a heads-up of what's coming and doesn't spring 2girls1cup on you without a warning is going to be more trusted than the one that does.
Why is that even a question when the same principles applies to content other than an unclothed female nipple or (gasp) genitals? Is it so hard to make the leap to other subjects, such as vivid depictions of rape and violence?
Why isn't it common sense that, regardless of studies of "efficacy", giving a heads-up about shit that some people in the audience might not want to see unprompted is, like, polite, and is universally a good thing?
It's frankly exhausting to even have these discussions, again and again. Trigger warnings are about not being an asshole to the people who choose to listen to you.
The effect is they might choose to listen to you again, because you're not a dick. End of story.
_______
TL;DR: the study focuses on nebulous "effects", whereas they should be looking at bounce rates.
So he analogizes this by saying "Imagine a doctor prescribed you a pill and you asked if it was going to help".
If "Oh no, it won't help, but it might cause some very minor harm." was the response, you'd probably find a new doctor. So why do we do the opposite here?
In reality, you're "being an asshole" with the trigger warnings, assuming you continue doing them knowing now that it does not help, and may actively harm.
Did it occur to the author that perhaps communicating when the triggering content is going to happen in advance, as well as giving a heads-up right before it to allow the people to make a choice to not experience it would be the thing to try in experiments?
Evidently not.
It feels like the author (and HN) thoroughly misunderstands both the concept of trigger warnings and informed consent.
>So he analogizes this by saying "Imagine a doctor prescribed you a pill and you asked if it was going to help". If "Oh no, it won't help, but it might cause some very minor harm." was the response, you'd probably find a new doctor. So why do we do the opposite here?
This analogy is beyond broken.
Ads for medication are required to include possible side effects. That's a closer analogy.
>In reality,
In the reality of broken analogies and hacks pushing flawed analysis and misunderstanding as research, I am a very sad person.
Let's be better than that.
1. patients invented and self-prescribed the pill originally
2. the doctor has concluded that the pills are harmful by studying what happens who do not have the illness the pills are meant to treat take the pills
3. the doctor didn't really keep track of what doses were given to different patients
i.e.
1. trigger warnings were not originally forced on people, they were created by people who found them helpful to help themselves
2. the studies in the meta analysis are all on general populations, in particular mechanical turk and college students
3. there is no discussion of the different effect different implementations of content warnings can have. for example, the only study that measured physiological responses instead of using self-reported anxiety showed the highest anxiety response. probably, because it also gave a completely general and non-specific content warning that went like this: "The next page has the link to the movie clip. Researchers have been asked to give a trigger warning for the clip". so they showed that when told some arbitrary but highly disturbing thing could happen at any point during a video, people in general will be more anxious when watching the video. and concluded that content warnings are a harmful practice.
So, I'd see things like this as more warning people that something contains content they might want to _avoid_. The analysis seems to be more about cases where people read the warning and then _consume the content anyway_, but is that really the common case?
Conservatives routinely get upset about the presence of gay people in media, among many other things. Is that somehow in a different category?
(This is in reply to the article linked by the author of the study in that Twitter thread)
That said, trigger warning is already a trigger word and may need to replaced with something else to avoid emotional reaction ( although I admit I do not have a good replacement off the top of my head ).
Some of the other posters mentioned movie ratings I almost chuckled a little, because I imagined a future, where I send an email in corporate settings with various tags to allow other people to ignore it in time and corporate code of conduct, where you agree to always read some upsetting tags..but I digress.
<< Is that somehow in a different category? << Conservatives routinely get upset about the presence of gay people in media, among many other things.
Please correct if I am wrong ( I have done my best to limit my news intake lately ), but conservatives being angry over gays does not ring true to my ears. If I understand current zeitgeist correctly, it is, currently, about a 'conveyor belt upon which progressives plan to place their children'(paraphrasing certain host). The difference is notable. Is it possible you are using old caricature for specific effect?
And this kinda brings me to the other point. Lately, it seems, it is not conservatives are not the ones calling for boycots, bans, deplatforming and demonetization. It is actually their opponents, which, in itself, is already interesting.
"Content warning" is fairly well-accepted (and broader, in that it makes more sense to use it to describe things that people simply _do not want to see_; see discussion of NSFL elsewhere.
Moral panics are nothing new, and (self-)censorship is nothing new either.
I think it's naive to think that conservatives have "gotten over" gay marriage, or gay rights more broadly, especially given how recent progress has been in those areas, and how much opposition remains to things like trans rights. I personally have a number of queer friends who are estranged from their families because they're queer, and those families usually aren't particularly progressive, as far as I know.
Without getting too far into the weeds of partisan politics, I’m not sure how you got this impression.
Ask your local school board or your local library which political side spends more time trying to get media banned.
Do you want to fit somewhere but haven't yet found a place to fit, or do you not care about fitting anywhere? If it's the latter you may have a social-variant blindspot (halfway down this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Enneagram/comments/kx0wfa/russ_huds... ). If it's the former you're probably just looking in the wrong places, or aren't engaging enough with the right people to find their similarities to you (or find out if they know of someone else similar to you).
"where I send an email in corporate settings with various tags to allow other people to ignore it in time and corporate code of conduct"
My employer uses a system called "Bucketlist" for kudos or something of the sort. I don't really know because the moment I saw it I created a filter that autodeletes every single email with that word in it. I can handle being reminded of death, but I don't want it popping into my work inbox.
"Please correct if I am wrong ( I have done my best to limit my news intake lately ), but conservatives being angry over gays does not ring true to my ears."
It depends. Media talking points should never be taken at face value. The Log Cabin Republicans continue to be denied a booth at the Texas Republican state convention: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/24/texas-log-cabin-repu...
But, as you indicate, conflation of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, transsexual, and a variety of other groups make it difficult at times to figure out what people are actually in favor of or opposed to.
"Lately, it seems, it is not conservatives are not the ones calling for boycots, bans, deplatforming and demonetization. It is actually their opponents, which, in itself, is already interesting."
It's all sides. If you're noticing one side and not the other it's because of the bias of the media you're consuming. Examples:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/06/why-half-...
https://theoutline.com/post/6140/a-brief-history-of-batshit-...
The presumption of this article is that trigger warnings get you emotionally ready for an adverse subject, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they are for.
I figure most people often want warnings on their books/videos/etc "e.g. this is a live-leak of somebody dying" so they can avoid the material.
---
Per his twitter "Well, too bad for all y'all. Trigger warnings do not seem to encourage avoidance." ... Sounds kinda us-vs-them.
I'm 100% sure I do not click on videos on reddit that indicate they are videos of somebody dying. No amount of statistical papers will change that. I highly doubt I'm the only one.
Trigger warnings are content warnings, just spelling out what the content is: i.e. suicide, cutting, rape, etc.
To use one of my stories that's on a podcast:
> This is an adult story for mature listeners, if that's not your cup of tea or there are children listening, you can skip this story and come back next week. Content warning: this story contains mentions of past self-harm and past traumas.
Maybe that's a little specific, but it gives you an idea of how graphic the content is. Regardless, I personally know some of the people listening who will want to skip my story.
So, the basic intent, on the face of it, is a little different (a "trigger warning", properly, warns of something which may trigger PTSD, a content warning merely warns of something without any particular view on _why_ someone might want to avoid it), but in practice they're functionally similar.
