Background and objectives

Trigger warnings have been described as helpful—enabling people to “emotionally prepare” for upcoming trauma-related material via “coping strategies.” However, no research has asked people what they think they would do when they come across a warning—an essential first step in providing evidence that trigger warnings are helpful.

Methods

Here, participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 260) completed one of two future thinking scenarios; we asked half to think about coming across a warning related to their most stressful/traumatic experience; the others thought about actual content (but no warning) related to their most stressful/traumatic experience.

Results

The warning condition did not produce differences in coping strategies, state anxiety, or phenomenology (e.g., vividness, valence) relative to the content condition. Only one key difference emerged: participants who imagined encountering a warning used fewer positive words, when describing how they would react.

Limitations

Although measuring actual behavior was not our aim, hypothetically simulating the future may not capture what actual future behavior would look like (i.e., an intention-behaviour gap).

Conclusions

One potential explanation for the consistent finding in the literature that trigger warnings fail to ameliorate negative emotional reactions is that these warnings may not help people bring coping strategies to mind. Although, further empirical work is necessary to fully substantiate this potential interpretation.

中文翻译：

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未做好准备：考虑触发警告并不会提示您为与创伤相关的内容做好准备

背景和目标

触发警告被描述为很有帮助——使人们能够通过“应对策略”为即将到来的创伤相关材料“做好心理准备”。然而，没有研究询问人们在遇到警告时他们认为自己会做什么——这是提供触发警告有用的证据的重要第一步。

方法

在这里，来自 Amazon 的 Mechanical Turk ( n  = 260) 的参与者完成了两个未来思考场景之一；我们要求一半的人考虑遇到与他们最紧张/创伤经历相关的警告；其他人考虑了与他们最大压力/创伤经历相关的实际内容（但没有警告）。

结果

警告条件相对于内容条件没有产生应对策略、状态焦虑或现象学（例如，生动性、效价）的差异。只出现了一个关键区别：想象遇到警告的参与者在描述他们将如何反应时使用较少的积极词。

限制

尽管测量实际行为不是我们的目标，但假设模拟未来可能无法捕捉到实际未来行为的样子（即意图-行为差距）。

结论

文献中一致发现触发警告未能改善负面情绪反应的一种可能解释是，这些警告可能无法帮助人们记住应对策略。虽然，需要进一步的实证工作来充分证实这种潜在的解释。