Trigger warnings failed to reduce anxiety to distressing content, reliably causing small increases in anxiety

Bellet, B. W., Jones, P. J., Meyersburg, C. A., Brenneman, M. M., Morehead, K. E., & McNally, R. J. (2020). Trigger warnings and resilience in college students: A preregistered replication and extension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Apr 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000270

Abstract: Trigger warnings notify people that content they are about to engage with may result in adverse emotional consequences. An experiment by Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018) indicated that trigger warnings increased the extent to which trauma-naïve crowd-sourced participants see themselves and others as emotionally vulnerable to potential future traumas but did not have a significant main effect on anxiety responses to distressing literature passages. However, they did increase anxiety responses for participants who strongly believed that words can harm. In this article, we present a preregistered replication of this study in a college student sample, using Bayesian statistics to estimate the success of each effect’s replication. We found strong evidence that none of the previously significant effects replicated. However, we found substantial evidence that trigger warnings’ previously nonsignificant main effect of increasing anxiety responses to distressing content was genuine, albeit small. Interpretation of the findings, implications, and future directions are discussed.