Yeah, that's because they had to watch the content anyway. Trigger warnings allow people to avoid triggering content, or to delay consuming the content until they're in a better frame of mind. If you say "This content has X, Y, and Z, and you have to consume it right now" the fact that you warned them isn't going to do much.
> Consider a meta-analysis of 39 studies in 2007 by Sam Houston State University in Texas that found a ‘clear, consistent association’ between using avoidance-based coping strategies (that is, staying away from upsetting stressors or avoiding thinking about them) and increased psychological distress.
... BUT the operative word is "associated" not "caused"
How does it compare with not being able to avoid upsetting stressors?
We're not comparing "coping mechanisms of avoidance" vs "coping mechanisms that allow you to face the stressor". We're comparing "coping mechanisms of avoidance" vs "being exposed to a stressor with no warning and no way to avoid it, regardless of if you do or dont have a coping mechanism in place at all".
Avoidance-based coping covers a broad variety of behavior beyond just 'don't expose yourself to a stressor', so a one-sentence reference without citation or further details is basically useless anyway.
People who can be expected to experience increased distress from the topic are much more likely to choose to avoid it, so I'm not surprised in the least by that association.
Also from the article:
> critics argue that the avoidance of potentially upsetting material is actually a counterproductive approach because it offers no chance to learn to manage one’s emotional reactions.
This is wrong. You don't learn to manage emotional reactions by being forced to consume triggering content. If you have a problem with emotional reactions that needs adjustment, that's what therapy is for. Or using delaying tactics such that you don't consume the content until you're more prepared to handle it. Anyone who thinks springing triggering content on people without warning is good because it forces them to react to it is literally abusive.
And many times avoiding triggering content forever is perfectly fine and doesn't need to be managed. Personally, I don't have any trauma around rape but I would really prefer to avoid reading about it, so I really appreciate trigger warnings on content that includes it. This isn't something that needs to be "fixed", there's no reason why I must work towards being indifferent towards rape.
I am no expert but it was my understanding that therapy for trauma often includes exposure to triggering stimuli precisely because it's not a realistic option to just hope you don't run into something triggering "in the wild" for the rest of your life.
Aren't the trigger warnings a DIY treatment themselves? In the absence of specific professional advice, I'd think the default would be to treat people normally. Why are we so eager to put trigger warnings on things without any evidence that they're doing more good than harm?
No, they’re not a treatment. They may aid someone who is in treatment, though.
I know an abuse survivor who has been in therapy for many years working on the impact of it. We avoid movies with abuse depictions as it causes severe disassociation and setbacks in that treatment.
Someone for whom it’s triggering but less severely so might just opt to watch said movies with a trusted friend on a day they’re feeling emotionally sound.
They allow folks to choose the level of exposure to optional, potentially damaging things. Just like an R rating on a film might make you pause before bringing an 8 year old to the theater.
Yes, but you do that with therapist in setting where potential meltdown has no consequences to you or other people. The therapist is also supposed to decide your progress based on how it is going.
My dog was afraid of taking a bath. I fixed this by rewarding her for coming into the bathroom. Once she was comfortable, I got her into the tub and rewarded her. After 15 minutes of "exposure therapy" she loves jumping into the tub and it's easier for both of us when she's stinky. I'm pretty sure people work similarly but it's hard to reward them with dog food.
People aren't dogs to be trained. To an extent, to be human and to recognize other people's humanity is to accept and accommodate their irrationality where doing so isn't particularly onerous to you.
Training works on people; people are animals. To a certain extent, this is what therapy is: helping people train parts of their brains to behave differently.
The difference is that we have therapists who are licensed to do this, and who are better at judging progress and when it might be appropriate to progress you.
Your average lecturer or teacher is not trained in this way, at least specifically regarding trauma.
The average lecturer was managing a class, but now they need to prescreen individuals for experiences that make them too weak for normal classes?
Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students reactions to trigger warnings, etc.
Bad ideas like every lecturer learning pop psychology "safety" and then reading tea leaves to tell people under their authority to get help is how you create a generation with psychological problems.
I don't think lectures need to do all that much work. They just need to think for a bit and warn people "Hey, this could be disturbing." That's pretty much it.
Its not like trigger warnings impose an onerous responsibility on teachers. There isn't any suggestion that they tell their students to get help. Its literally just a "heads up, I'm about to talk about X".
I'm not on a campus, and when I was in was in physics and math classrooms, but its hard to imagine this is that big of a deal.
I think the article covers why simply announcing trigger warnings is not helpful but more importantly why it is not a steady state system.
As I see it this is basically recreating the weaker sex etiquette argument with bias based on experiences instead of gender. All the outrage.of speaking in front of the wrong people, special new requirements, plenty of signalling that you are better than others because they manage the necessary risks to do their job.
"Hey, this book contains a graphical description of rape" is very low effort, just like how telling somebody that a food you made yourself contains peanuts is very low effort.
The only time lecturers wouldn't know when something might trigger someone is if they haven't actually read or looked at the content that they're about to present, which I find pretty hard to believe.
With a peanut allergy you have it and don't eat the food.
With the trigger warning what exactly? It's easy to announce something you are going to do and do it. The article addresses how pointless and possibly counterproductive that is.
With a peanut allergy you have it and don't consume the food to avoid the adverse effects.
With a trigger warning you simply don't consume the content. Ideally, this is posted on the syllabus, so that the amount of time wasted arguing about this is minimized.
The article doesn't really "address" anything, it just makes value statements. For example, this paragraph:
> Consider a meta-analysis of 39 studies in 2007 by Sam Houston State University in Texas that found a ‘clear, consistent association’ between using avoidance-based coping strategies (that is, staying away from upsetting stressors or avoiding thinking about them) and increased psychological distress. For a more concrete example, look at the findings from a study, published in 2011, of women who witnessed the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007 – those who tried to avoid thinking about what happened tended to experience more symptoms of depression and anxiety in the months that followed.
You could say that the association is that people who avoid their traumas are more depressed and anxious, but you could also say the reverse, that people who are more depressed or anxious try to avoid the traumas that caused those things in the first place. It's an association with no causal link, so you don't know which direction the association runs in or even if one is directly caused by the other.
Trigger warnings are an avoidance mechanism, period. The only difference between this and a peanut allergy is that people don't feel the need to moralize about how we're enabling peanut-avoiders like it's a bad thing.
> The only difference between this and a peanut allergy is that people don't feel the need to moralize about how we're enabling peanut-avoiders like it's a bad thing.
Er, no. Most people are doing a rough calculation of frequency of real allergy to self diagnosis and quack practitioners.. Substitute another food like wheat and you get a different result. Then people start asking why perception of allergies is spreading when actual prevalence is unchanged and you get back to the proven science understanding of psychology, placebo.
My point wasn't about whether or not you can train people. My point is that you shouldn't, in general, think of human beings as things upon which you perform training.
There may be certain contexts in which training is an acceptable thing for a person to do or have done to them, but that typically doesn't apply to normal interactions between adult human beings.
"Indifferent towards rape."
Seriously? Not being triggered by a depiction of a rape in a novel doesn't mean you're indifferent towards rape.
And while "springing" "triggering" "content" on a weak person is a bad idea, encouraging them to seek out triggering content on their own and approach it at their own pace is going to create a stronger, better person. It's not just about the trigger either - learning that you can overcome something like that is extremely empowering. Hiding for the rest of your life is slowly going to turn you into a coward.
> Not being triggered by a depiction of a rape in a novel doesn't mean you're indifferent towards rape.
That wasn't the point being made.
The point is that if depictions of rape are triggering to you, it's not necessarily important to work on not being triggered by rape depictions. Avoidance is generally acceptable there.
Isn't it better for a person to not be triggerable?
Wouldn't you wish, if a friend of yours was chronically vunerable in a way that hindered them that, all else being equal, they would become more resilient- for their own sake?
Being triggerable is a weakness. It gives others power over you. So why would anyone want that?
Also, not being triggerable does not mean being insensitive or cynical or tolerant or whatever. It's just about being able to deal with stuff without freaking out.
Even after decades of therapy, rape victims may still be triggered by descriptions/depictions of rape. Abuse victims may not be able to watch a movie with an abused child without breaking down, even after long, intensive therapy.
And upon reflection, I get that I'm triggered by dogs. Having been attacked by a doberman, many years ago. And surviving only because it was on a chain, and I didn't fall down. So it only took a chunk out of one ankle.
So now, whenever I encounter a dog, I immediately think about what I could use as a weapon.
And what does a desensitzing theraphy do? In ever increasing steps push you into trigger material, be it spiders, heigths or whatever.
Nobody has a right to be bubbled. We are all in this together, and not facing the world is a coping strategy that leads to dependencies, dependencies lead to effectively self-imprisonment. Which then is blamed on those people used as shield. Which just generates more conflict, that is then again delegated, in a recursive circle, until basically discurs-controll is archieved, holding oneself as Hikikomorihostage.
> I really appreciate trigger warnings on content that includes it.
This is fine as long as it's kept within reason like certain more commonly occurring traumatic themes such as sexual violence, etc. Conversely, it's also possible to go too far and let this get out of hand. If, for example, we were to let everyone define whatever they feel may personally trigger or offend them, we could end up with half of everything needing various warnings for each one-in-ten-thousand person's particular sensitivity. That could grow unmanageable pretty quickly and become an unreasonable burden on publishers, performers, teachers, comedians, etc.
I feel there needs to be a healthy balance between the responsibilities we expect speaker/publisher to bear and the responsibility each individual must bear. It's reasonable to expect individuals choosing to participate in the public sphere possess a modicum of resilience. Otherwise, we risk diminishing the diversity of our robust marketplace of ideas.
In my experience, content warnings are usually a product of authorial judgement. For instance, I once wrote an article that discussed some people with extremely racist views. It occurred to me that some people might not want to read quotes containing vile, offensive comments about their race (or even someone else's). So I put a warning at the top so that such people wouldn't read the article if they didn't think they could handle it. No one forced me to do it. No one would have come for my head if I hadn't. As far as I can tell, this is the usual case: people put content warnings on their content for reasonable things when they think it's a good idea. I really don't see anything remotely resembling a problem, and I think people only really get upset about content warnings as a proxy for the greater culture war.
Right, avoidance may not be a good coping strategy at large, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't be extended the courtesy of being able to choose to avoid exposure in certain contexts. Ideally exposure therapy for trauma should be done in a controlled setting, like therapy.
Heck, I don't have PTSD but I don't particularly like seeing sexual violence in movies or television shows and more than once I wish I had been warned about it ahead of time.
From my point of view, trigger warnings are courteous. Its not my job to tell people how to live their lives. If someone asks me in good faith to let them know before I talk about something that might disturb them, I take that seriously because I'm not a jerk.
The idea that trigger warnings constitute some kind of creeping Orwellian thing is nuts to me. The whole point of them is "I'm going to say this!"
> Heck, I don't have PTSD but I don't particularly like seeing sexual violence in movies or television shows and more than once I wish I had been warned about it ahead of time.
Related to that, a lot of people prefer watching certain genres such as action, romance, sports, sci-fi, comedy, etc... If it's ok to inform people they're about to watch an Adam Sandler romcom then I don't see what's so bad about informing people they're about to encounter triggering content.
I also find the attempt at equating trigger warnings and avoidance coping pretty disingenuous, given that 'avoidance coping' as a concept includes both positive behaviors (meditating, reasonable exercise) and negative behaviors (binge eating, drug use).
It feels like wasted effort in this context then. The article talks a lot about the university setting specifically, you can't just not engage with your course material and expect to have the same educational outcomes as someone who did. It seems like it'd be more effective for majors to list their trigger warnings before the course even starts with the understanding that if you can't handle the content then you should probably choose a difference major. Likewise, it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted.
I feel like even with courses taken as a given, there's still some measure of common courtesy there in stuff like "in week 2 you're going to see a pretty gross safety video, don't eat lunch beforehand".
Yes you can. You can choose to skip a particular lecture if it's covering particularly triggering topics. If the lecture is particularly important, you can approach the professor about dealing with the lecture content in a more sensitive one-on-one context, or see if the lecture is recorded such that you can watch it later when you have more mental spoons to deal with it.
> it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted
Teachers should not be making their students uncomfortable (let alone triggering trauma) by surprise. This is a consent issue.
Why is this a consent issue? Lots of intro to sociology classes do a lesson on the Nacirema, race and violence are massive components of studying mid 20th century literature, and plenty of other fields of study have lessons that are meant to convey an emotional context and not just an informational one and they do this often with surprise elements. Labeling that as traumatic and non-consensual glosses over the part where the main people who seem to be reporting trauma from these lessons are people who already had trauma and are clearly still influenced heavily by it or they wouldn't need trigger warnings. Calling it a consent issue frankly is just a dog whistle.
And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? The professor already selected the information they felt was relevant and presented it in the fashion they felt was the most useful to the class. Your viewpoint only seems to make sense if the default assumption is that emotional information isn't a priority for the instructor but that doesn't jive with how a large swathe of the humanities and social sciences are often taught.
> And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards?
Reality check: so that you distinguish yourself from the slackers who did not came, because they did not felt like going. And there are always those.
Second, it is contra argument against "will not learn something important" argument. Visit teacher during open hours to learn that important thing. In all likelyhood, there is no massive thing to catch up with. Typically these are materials that are mean to make the issue of violence and rape less academic to students - seeing bodies makes it more real then reading about bodies. It is mostly emotional impact that is avoided.
Even if emotional impact is priority, emotional impact on person we are talking about is different then emotional impact on me. The material works completely differvently way for them.
Typically, the violent material is shown to students so that they break naive bubbles of how easy it is. People we talk about knows about it more then a student after seeing it.
What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise? It is one of those arguments that make these all discussions completely outside of my experience. I never seen material that would be harmed by that. Not even movies and I hate spoilers.
I was never triggered. I was never triggered by trigger warning either, I just don't care. For all I know, veterans and raped or abused people can have all the warnings they want and nothing whatsoever changes for me. They can not have them and nothing whatsoever changes for me.
These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. And the hostility of the whole debate from anyone except those few directly affected is puzzling. Like, one 100 people will skip that one lecture that has detailed depiction of rape. Big deal.
Plus traditionally, education went out of its way to euphemise rapes and sex generally away. Like, calling using the word rape to characterize rape in old text did not used to be common. They used to prefer to talk about it in codes.
>What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise?
It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots.
With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection.
Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context.
Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group.
>These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most.
This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).
None of those things seem to be like particularly harmed by people being told in advance that violence or rape will happen. Or even knowing in advance that racism or sexism would be depicted.
Knowing in advance that the n-word word appears will not make cornerstone speech different nor make Frederick Douglass book read different. Students don't have to say n-word to read it in context either?
Trigger warning to classic movie would not be the whole plot. Plus plenty of students will know plot or read the plot on imdb and classic movies are very mild about rape and violence due to censorship at the time and generally society overreacting to those depictions back then. (If they are about to show snuff or B movies I am actually fine with students bailing out or at least know in advance.) Are they gonna show whole movie in lecture suddenly? That would be quite unlikely, things like movies tend to be homework.
The movies that made me feel bad about violence and stuff did not relied on surprise. Surprise is for entertainment and being clever in plot.
I agree that none of the examples I gave would lose much of their impact, but I'd argue that's also not directly tied in to the ovarching point I was trying to express (though obviously I expressed it badly or else that's where the focus would be).
It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surprise can be used as a catalyst for introspection or introducing a strategic amount of discomfort to illustrate a point, etc. the point I was trying to make is simply that it has utility. When you are /required/ to have a trigger warning, as an instructor, you are being obligated to compromise the effect you were trying to persue and presumably you were trying to persue it because you thought it would help the class with some form of comprehension whether that be intellectual or emotional.
Even if you're not outright required to issue trigger warnings (lets say because a middle ground policy is implemented that encourages instructors to do so but leaves it to their discretion) those instructors are still required to adapt to triggered students or else they wouldn't have been encouraged/required to do so in the first place. But because there's no reliable way to know what specific content will trigger a student in a given class the system is actually incentivizing censorship because now the only way to ensure you minimize trigger events is to assume that every student is triggerable and so optimal content becomes content which is as unchallenging, emotionally speaking, as possible.
Allergies wouldn't be a terrible analogy. Lots of schools, in America I can't speak for Europe and elsehwere, have regulations about common allergies like peanuts. These regulations are targeted towards common allergies because otherwise the task of preventing allergic reactions becomes an all encompassing battle to minimize liability. That's not to say students with rare allergies shouldn't be accommodated at all, but at some point the impact on the other students has to be addressed.
What I am saying is that this is purely theoretical construct. That fine tuned impactful lesson that is so great, but breaks if I dont know the violence will be there, it does not exist. Not even art works that way.
And if it does, it sounds awful lot like something manipulative. Minor red flag wtf is going on manipulative. It is supposed to be college lesson.
Edit: I have seen trigger warning I lecture about American history from one of big schools (on youtube, they released it free). The lecturer just said "I will show violence" or some such and that was it. If you left the room, you would not get any special material. You would just avoid sight of dead mistreated people.
I'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but education as a field has a very large collection of practices that could easily be described as manipulation. At the same time, I'm worried manipulation seems like the right word because I've been focusing mainly on surprise content to establish a fast example for the discussion even though what I've really been trying to drive at is the way that trigger warnings and their implementation/expection impacts the teacher-student dynamic.
I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice.
You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.
It sounds kind of silly, but this was a real problem for us when my preschooler went through a phase where he only ate peanut butter sandwiches. His preschool wouldn't let us pack them in his lunch despite none of the other kids in his class actually having peanut allergies. We threw away a lot of uneaten cheese sticks and apple slices that month.
While avoidant behaviours often aren't ideal in isolation, they can still be part of useful recovery. If you're getting therapy for trauma, the therapy may expose you to triggers in a controlled fashion to help you reprocess the relevant trauma and memories (for example, using EMDR [1]). Exposure outside of the therapy can still be damaging.
Wow, I whole-heartedly disagree. This is a constructive criticism of a communication technique.
If a person is lacking in the mental fortitude to be exposed to unexpected information- but that person is still putting themself in unexpected information situations, it certainly suggests that they have judgement problems.
I don't think that many people have judgement problems when it comes to avoiding pain. I agree with OP. Virtue signaling seems like the far more likely explanation for this behavior.
Trigger warnings are harmful for society as well. Grown adults at university get coddled with the stuff, then released out into the cold, cruel, uncaring world. Not a good turn for society.
I notice a trend, at least in online fora, to glorify or almost celebrate anxiety and neuroticism. I'm not weighing in on the cause for this phenomenon but I wouldn't be surprised if this is related in some way.
Your response not only avoids the question, it makes guessing based on trailers and posters into "basic reason". The movie industry is filled with deceptive trailers and marketing, and just guessing at it will fail eventually if you keep trying long enough.
Not really, but I do think Common Sense Media does a better job describing why a film is rated for content by providing spoiler free details of the contents. TWs are not in service of age warning, but of content appropriateness.
The material presented in this lecture uses explicit language and discusses certain situations in database management systems that may be triggering to some students
---
After browsing some of the literature there, I honestly couldn't decide, and still can't, if it was meant as a joke or they are being serious. The joke being something like "this database that doesn't actually run fsync to write to disk before returning a successful result" or they are genuinely concerned about students' well-being.
But assuming they are serious, which I hope they are, what can students do there? Do they have a choice to avoid reading the work. Then if CS requires trigger warnings, how is history. It would just be full of brutality, abuse and awfulness.
As if he were abducting sub-Saharan Africans, and auctioning them to cotton plantations himself. It wasn't even anything close to such a sentiment until thought crusaders made it about that, because their own private mind crimes left them feeling icky.
There's a special place in hell, reserved for such purveyors of behavior modification, come the day of reckoning.
The best way I've seen it described is in the Coddling of the American Mind [1] which basically says that trigger warnings aren't a treatment for PTSD, they are a symptom.
Trigger warnings are incredibly important for PTSD sufferers, and every time people criticize them or make light of them, they forget about the victims of CSA, the veterans, the disaster survivors, and others who struggle daily to manage their mental health.
I know HN likes to express themselves ina more r lightened manner but I’m just gonna rap here. Trigger warning are for pussies and betas. This has nothing to do with PTSD or mental health. Society contains an amount of weak spirited people. We cannot coddle the weak or we will fail.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] thread> Consider a meta-analysis of 39 studies in 2007 by Sam Houston State University in Texas that found a ‘clear, consistent association’ between using avoidance-based coping strategies (that is, staying away from upsetting stressors or avoiding thinking about them) and increased psychological distress.
... BUT the operative word is "associated" not "caused"
We're not comparing "coping mechanisms of avoidance" vs "coping mechanisms that allow you to face the stressor". We're comparing "coping mechanisms of avoidance" vs "being exposed to a stressor with no warning and no way to avoid it, regardless of if you do or dont have a coping mechanism in place at all".
Also from the article:
> critics argue that the avoidance of potentially upsetting material is actually a counterproductive approach because it offers no chance to learn to manage one’s emotional reactions.
This is wrong. You don't learn to manage emotional reactions by being forced to consume triggering content. If you have a problem with emotional reactions that needs adjustment, that's what therapy is for. Or using delaying tactics such that you don't consume the content until you're more prepared to handle it. Anyone who thinks springing triggering content on people without warning is good because it forces them to react to it is literally abusive.
And many times avoiding triggering content forever is perfectly fine and doesn't need to be managed. Personally, I don't have any trauma around rape but I would really prefer to avoid reading about it, so I really appreciate trigger warnings on content that includes it. This isn't something that needs to be "fixed", there's no reason why I must work towards being indifferent towards rape.
That should be done safely and consensually within the context of a therapy session/plan with a professional guiding it.
It's like surgery. Entirely acceptable in certain scenarios, but you'd object if your English lit prof decided to DIY it during class.
I know an abuse survivor who has been in therapy for many years working on the impact of it. We avoid movies with abuse depictions as it causes severe disassociation and setbacks in that treatment.
Someone for whom it’s triggering but less severely so might just opt to watch said movies with a trusted friend on a day they’re feeling emotionally sound.
They allow folks to choose the level of exposure to optional, potentially damaging things. Just like an R rating on a film might make you pause before bringing an 8 year old to the theater.
Your average lecturer or teacher is not trained in this way, at least specifically regarding trauma.
Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students reactions to trigger warnings, etc.
Bad ideas like every lecturer learning pop psychology "safety" and then reading tea leaves to tell people under their authority to get help is how you create a generation with psychological problems.
Its not like trigger warnings impose an onerous responsibility on teachers. There isn't any suggestion that they tell their students to get help. Its literally just a "heads up, I'm about to talk about X".
I'm not on a campus, and when I was in was in physics and math classrooms, but its hard to imagine this is that big of a deal.
As I see it this is basically recreating the weaker sex etiquette argument with bias based on experiences instead of gender. All the outrage.of speaking in front of the wrong people, special new requirements, plenty of signalling that you are better than others because they manage the necessary risks to do their job.
The only time lecturers wouldn't know when something might trigger someone is if they haven't actually read or looked at the content that they're about to present, which I find pretty hard to believe.
With the trigger warning what exactly? It's easy to announce something you are going to do and do it. The article addresses how pointless and possibly counterproductive that is.
With a trigger warning you simply don't consume the content. Ideally, this is posted on the syllabus, so that the amount of time wasted arguing about this is minimized.
The article doesn't really "address" anything, it just makes value statements. For example, this paragraph:
> Consider a meta-analysis of 39 studies in 2007 by Sam Houston State University in Texas that found a ‘clear, consistent association’ between using avoidance-based coping strategies (that is, staying away from upsetting stressors or avoiding thinking about them) and increased psychological distress. For a more concrete example, look at the findings from a study, published in 2011, of women who witnessed the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007 – those who tried to avoid thinking about what happened tended to experience more symptoms of depression and anxiety in the months that followed.
You could say that the association is that people who avoid their traumas are more depressed and anxious, but you could also say the reverse, that people who are more depressed or anxious try to avoid the traumas that caused those things in the first place. It's an association with no causal link, so you don't know which direction the association runs in or even if one is directly caused by the other.
Trigger warnings are an avoidance mechanism, period. The only difference between this and a peanut allergy is that people don't feel the need to moralize about how we're enabling peanut-avoiders like it's a bad thing.
Er, no. Most people are doing a rough calculation of frequency of real allergy to self diagnosis and quack practitioners.. Substitute another food like wheat and you get a different result. Then people start asking why perception of allergies is spreading when actual prevalence is unchanged and you get back to the proven science understanding of psychology, placebo.
https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/all...
There may be certain contexts in which training is an acceptable thing for a person to do or have done to them, but that typically doesn't apply to normal interactions between adult human beings.
I believe their implication was that we can and should be training ourselves, which is something we already do every day.
And while "springing" "triggering" "content" on a weak person is a bad idea, encouraging them to seek out triggering content on their own and approach it at their own pace is going to create a stronger, better person. It's not just about the trigger either - learning that you can overcome something like that is extremely empowering. Hiding for the rest of your life is slowly going to turn you into a coward.
That wasn't the point being made.
The point is that if depictions of rape are triggering to you, it's not necessarily important to work on not being triggered by rape depictions. Avoidance is generally acceptable there.
Wouldn't you wish, if a friend of yours was chronically vunerable in a way that hindered them that, all else being equal, they would become more resilient- for their own sake?
Triggering people in an unsafe, uncontrolled context can make it harder, not easier.
Being triggerable is a weakness. It gives others power over you. So why would anyone want that?
Also, not being triggerable does not mean being insensitive or cynical or tolerant or whatever. It's just about being able to deal with stuff without freaking out.
Even after decades of therapy, rape victims may still be triggered by descriptions/depictions of rape. Abuse victims may not be able to watch a movie with an abused child without breaking down, even after long, intensive therapy.
It's not generally a choice.
And upon reflection, I get that I'm triggered by dogs. Having been attacked by a doberman, many years ago. And surviving only because it was on a chain, and I didn't fall down. So it only took a chunk out of one ankle.
So now, whenever I encounter a dog, I immediately think about what I could use as a weapon.
Are you a therapist?
Are you their therapist?
Nobody has a right to be bubbled. We are all in this together, and not facing the world is a coping strategy that leads to dependencies, dependencies lead to effectively self-imprisonment. Which then is blamed on those people used as shield. Which just generates more conflict, that is then again delegated, in a recursive circle, until basically discurs-controll is archieved, holding oneself as Hikikomorihostage.
This is fine as long as it's kept within reason like certain more commonly occurring traumatic themes such as sexual violence, etc. Conversely, it's also possible to go too far and let this get out of hand. If, for example, we were to let everyone define whatever they feel may personally trigger or offend them, we could end up with half of everything needing various warnings for each one-in-ten-thousand person's particular sensitivity. That could grow unmanageable pretty quickly and become an unreasonable burden on publishers, performers, teachers, comedians, etc.
I feel there needs to be a healthy balance between the responsibilities we expect speaker/publisher to bear and the responsibility each individual must bear. It's reasonable to expect individuals choosing to participate in the public sphere possess a modicum of resilience. Otherwise, we risk diminishing the diversity of our robust marketplace of ideas.
Heck, I don't have PTSD but I don't particularly like seeing sexual violence in movies or television shows and more than once I wish I had been warned about it ahead of time.
From my point of view, trigger warnings are courteous. Its not my job to tell people how to live their lives. If someone asks me in good faith to let them know before I talk about something that might disturb them, I take that seriously because I'm not a jerk.
The idea that trigger warnings constitute some kind of creeping Orwellian thing is nuts to me. The whole point of them is "I'm going to say this!"
try not to be one.
Related to that, a lot of people prefer watching certain genres such as action, romance, sports, sci-fi, comedy, etc... If it's ok to inform people they're about to watch an Adam Sandler romcom then I don't see what's so bad about informing people they're about to encounter triggering content.
> it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted
Teachers should not be making their students uncomfortable (let alone triggering trauma) by surprise. This is a consent issue.
And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? The professor already selected the information they felt was relevant and presented it in the fashion they felt was the most useful to the class. Your viewpoint only seems to make sense if the default assumption is that emotional information isn't a priority for the instructor but that doesn't jive with how a large swathe of the humanities and social sciences are often taught.
Reality check: so that you distinguish yourself from the slackers who did not came, because they did not felt like going. And there are always those.
Second, it is contra argument against "will not learn something important" argument. Visit teacher during open hours to learn that important thing. In all likelyhood, there is no massive thing to catch up with. Typically these are materials that are mean to make the issue of violence and rape less academic to students - seeing bodies makes it more real then reading about bodies. It is mostly emotional impact that is avoided.
Even if emotional impact is priority, emotional impact on person we are talking about is different then emotional impact on me. The material works completely differvently way for them.
Typically, the violent material is shown to students so that they break naive bubbles of how easy it is. People we talk about knows about it more then a student after seeing it.
I was never triggered. I was never triggered by trigger warning either, I just don't care. For all I know, veterans and raped or abused people can have all the warnings they want and nothing whatsoever changes for me. They can not have them and nothing whatsoever changes for me.
These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most. And the hostility of the whole debate from anyone except those few directly affected is puzzling. Like, one 100 people will skip that one lecture that has detailed depiction of rape. Big deal.
Plus traditionally, education went out of its way to euphemise rapes and sex generally away. Like, calling using the word rape to characterize rape in old text did not used to be common. They used to prefer to talk about it in codes.
It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots.
With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection.
Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context.
Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group.
>These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most.
This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).
Knowing in advance that the n-word word appears will not make cornerstone speech different nor make Frederick Douglass book read different. Students don't have to say n-word to read it in context either?
Trigger warning to classic movie would not be the whole plot. Plus plenty of students will know plot or read the plot on imdb and classic movies are very mild about rape and violence due to censorship at the time and generally society overreacting to those depictions back then. (If they are about to show snuff or B movies I am actually fine with students bailing out or at least know in advance.) Are they gonna show whole movie in lecture suddenly? That would be quite unlikely, things like movies tend to be homework.
The movies that made me feel bad about violence and stuff did not relied on surprise. Surprise is for entertainment and being clever in plot.
It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surprise can be used as a catalyst for introspection or introducing a strategic amount of discomfort to illustrate a point, etc. the point I was trying to make is simply that it has utility. When you are /required/ to have a trigger warning, as an instructor, you are being obligated to compromise the effect you were trying to persue and presumably you were trying to persue it because you thought it would help the class with some form of comprehension whether that be intellectual or emotional.
Even if you're not outright required to issue trigger warnings (lets say because a middle ground policy is implemented that encourages instructors to do so but leaves it to their discretion) those instructors are still required to adapt to triggered students or else they wouldn't have been encouraged/required to do so in the first place. But because there's no reliable way to know what specific content will trigger a student in a given class the system is actually incentivizing censorship because now the only way to ensure you minimize trigger events is to assume that every student is triggerable and so optimal content becomes content which is as unchallenging, emotionally speaking, as possible.
Allergies wouldn't be a terrible analogy. Lots of schools, in America I can't speak for Europe and elsehwere, have regulations about common allergies like peanuts. These regulations are targeted towards common allergies because otherwise the task of preventing allergic reactions becomes an all encompassing battle to minimize liability. That's not to say students with rare allergies shouldn't be accommodated at all, but at some point the impact on the other students has to be addressed.
And if it does, it sounds awful lot like something manipulative. Minor red flag wtf is going on manipulative. It is supposed to be college lesson.
Edit: I have seen trigger warning I lecture about American history from one of big schools (on youtube, they released it free). The lecturer just said "I will show violence" or some such and that was it. If you left the room, you would not get any special material. You would just avoid sight of dead mistreated people.
I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice.
You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.
Not all avoidance and exposure are equal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_a...
If a person is lacking in the mental fortitude to be exposed to unexpected information- but that person is still putting themself in unexpected information situations, it certainly suggests that they have judgement problems.
I don't think that many people have judgement problems when it comes to avoiding pain. I agree with OP. Virtue signaling seems like the far more likely explanation for this behavior.
Being able to reduce or temper that exposure is literally the point of trigger warnings.
Then again, I believe discomfort is a human experience and trying to insulate against it, runs against the human experience and life itself.
Absolutely, yes.
https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2017/schedule.html#wa...
It has this warning:
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The material presented in this lecture uses explicit language and discusses certain situations in database management systems that may be triggering to some students
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After browsing some of the literature there, I honestly couldn't decide, and still can't, if it was meant as a joke or they are being serious. The joke being something like "this database that doesn't actually run fsync to write to disk before returning a successful result" or they are genuinely concerned about students' well-being.
But assuming they are serious, which I hope they are, what can students do there? Do they have a choice to avoid reading the work. Then if CS requires trigger warnings, how is history. It would just be full of brutality, abuse and awfulness.
Much in the same way @antirez was cowed over the use of such language within the context of Redis.
http://antirez.com/news/122
As if he were abducting sub-Saharan Africans, and auctioning them to cotton plantations himself. It wasn't even anything close to such a sentiment until thought crusaders made it about that, because their own private mind crimes left them feeling icky.
There's a special place in hell, reserved for such purveyors of behavior modification, come the day of reckoning.
Are we shocked?
1 https://www.thecoddling.com/
A person who's house burns down from a electrical fault isn't as affected as someone in a disaster?
This gatekeeping is the problem.
Awful things happen everyday to people.
This Facebook generation of Yay, I'm more hurt than you, so deserve more attention competition is pretty messed up.