什么是trigger warning？

LearnAndRecord 2022-07-26

什么是trigger warning？A trigger warning is a message presented to an audience about the contents of a book or other media, to warn them that it contains potentially distressing content.

Trigger warning字面意思是「触发警告」，似乎不太好理解。

换个类似的说法，「高能预警」你可能就听过了，据百度百科，高能预警是在观看视频时，如果接下来的视频影音会对玩家或者观众的心理造成一定的冲击时，出现的弹幕预警，提醒观众做好心理准备。

这会你再看「Trigger warning」的英文解释，应该就比较明白了。

Do Trigger Warnings Really Help?

无注释原文：

The Real Problem With Trigger Warnings

The Atlantic

In 2016, Onni Gust, a historian at the University of Nottingham, wrote in The Guardian about using trigger warnings to help students “stop for a moment and breathe” during class. Gust described how a slide presentation might note that the next slide references mutilation, or that the following passage includes a graphic description of sexual violence. The warnings don’t allow students to skip the class reading assignments, but instead remind students to use their coping strategies and “keep breathing,” Gust wrote.

About half of U.S. professors use trigger warnings, which are brief tags meant to alert students that certain class texts and images contain material related to racism, sexual violence, or other trauma-related topics. In an email conversation with me this week, Gust, who uses plural pronouns, told me they were still in support of the warnings. That’s despite the fact that a few studies have recently come out suggesting that trigger warnings have little impact—positive or negative—on those who see them.

In a 2018 paper, three Harvard researchers had participants either see or not see trigger warnings before reading passages that contained disturbing content, such as a gory murder scene from Crime and Punishment. The researchers found that trigger warnings actually slightly increased people’s self-reported anxiety—but only among people who believed that words can cause emotional damage. Overall, the warnings had no significant effect.

Trigger warnings are primarily intended to help people who have experienced traumatic events, such as rape. The Harvard study did not include any people who self-reported an experience of trauma, which cast doubt on how widely it could be applied to all college students. A more recent study addressed that limitation but achieved essentially the same results. Participants who were warned that they were about to watch graphic footage or read a graphic story felt just as badly as those who weren’t warned. They had a similar number of intrusive thoughts afterward. Seeing a trigger warning only slightly decreased the participants’ attempts to avoid thinking about the graphic material.

This finding—that trigger warnings made practically no difference for any of these symptoms—was true even for participants who had a history of trauma, including subjects whose type of trauma matched the nature of the content they watched. “These analyses suggest trigger warnings have trivial effects even among people for whom such warnings may be specifically intended,” the study’s authors find.

The authors argue that their research should condemn trigger warnings to the dustbin of wokeness history. They write that though it might seem like their results suggest there’s no harm in keeping the warnings, they nevertheless worry that the warnings’ widespread adoption could be part of what’s hurting college students’ mental health. “College students are increasingly anxious … and widespread adoption of trigger warnings in syllabi may promote this trend, tacitly encouraging students to turn to avoidance, thereby depriving them of opportunities to learn healthier ways to manage potential distress,” they write.

In an interview with Inside Higher Education, the study’s lead author, Mevagh Sanson, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychology at New Zealand’s University of Waikato, put it bluntly: “Trigger warnings don’t help.”

Payton Jones, a co-author of the 2018 trigger-warnings paper, also told me that he would be hesitant to use the warnings as a professor because there is so little evidence that they help anyone. Signaling to trauma survivors that you’re helping them when you’re actually not can be “invalidating,” he said. “It’s crazy that trigger warnings have spread so far before a single study had come out evaluating them.”

Meanwhile, some professors don’t feel that this research calls for an end to the use of trigger warnings. Gust still sees a benefit; they consider the warnings to be like a font that helps dyslexic people read. “They can be used to help with accessibility ... they help students suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to access material that has a strong likelihood of triggering a mental-health crisis,” they told me. They also like that trigger warnings signal to their students that people come from different walks of life.

Kristin J. Jacobson, a professor of American literature and gender studies at Stockton University, says she’d like to see studies on trigger warnings that more closely mirror the academic experience, in which written trigger warnings are just part of a class’s overall treatment of a certain text, which might include discussion and other activities. Jacobson began using trigger warnings because of feedback from her students, and she told me that she will continue to use trigger warnings despite the recent research, because she sees them as a way to “open a conversation about how we respond to the literary arts.”

Syllabus development is not typically such a hot topic, but trigger warnings have become a flash point in the modern-day culture wars. Proponents are branded as overly sensitive snowflakes who do too much to keep their students safe. Opponents are caricatured as Quillette-reading inhabitants of the “intellectual dark web” who want everyone to toughen up already.

But all this arguing has been taking place over an intervention that hasn’t been studied very thoroughly at all. Neither of the two recent studies focused on people with PTSD, for instance, and perhaps certain kinds of trigger warnings do work for that population. The authors of the more recent study note that they could find no data directly addressing trigger warnings’ effects until the 2018 paper was published. As recently as 2017, an article on the website of the American Psychological Association found that “almost no research has directly examined classroom trigger warnings.”

In contrast, an outdated educational theory that’s much less controversial—the myth that some people are “visual” or “auditory” learners—has been studied again and again and shown to have little scientific validity. From the feedback I received after I wrote a story about the research on these so-called learning styles, professors seemed more willing to back down in the face of evidence that it’s not true. And doing so seemed to be easier for them because no one has thrown learning styles into the internet’s identity battles.

The problem with the politicization of trigger warnings is that it privileges how people feel about them over a sober analysis of their effects. To truly determine how these warnings are influencing students’ mental health, both the warnings’ proponents and their haters need to be ready to be proved wrong. You wouldn’t dramatically change your diet on the basis of one—or even two—studies, and the same should go for an entire generation’s psychology.

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含注释全文：

The Real Problem With Trigger Warnings

The Atlantic

In 2016, Onni Gust, a historian at the University of Nottingham, wrote in The Guardian about using trigger warnings to help students “stop for a moment and breathe” during class. Gust described how a slide presentation might note that the next slide references mutilation, or that the following passage includes a graphic description of sexual violence. The warnings don’t allow students to skip the class reading assignments, but instead remind students to use their coping strategies and “keep breathing,” Gust wrote.

trigger warnings

表示“预警；提醒一下”，英文解释为“a statement at the beginning of a piece of writing, before the start of a film, etc., warning people that they may find the content very upsetting, especially if they have experienced something similar.”

mutilation

动词mutilate /ˈmjuːtɪˌleɪt/，表示“使残废；使残缺不全；毁伤”，英文解释为“to damage sb's body very severely, especially by cutting or tearing off part of it”举个🌰：

He tortured and mutilated two young men.

他折磨致残了两个年轻男人。

名词mutilation，此前在英国首相约翰逊宣布订婚一文中提到一个说法FGM，female genital mutilation，表示“女性割礼”，英文解释为“the practice of cutting away parts of a girl's or woman's outer sex organs for traditional or religious reasons”。在撒哈拉以南、北非及中东等地区，许多族群将其视为传统习俗的一部分，目前已知有27个国家境内具有这种陋习。

trauma /ˈtrɔːmə/

1）表示“痛苦经历；挫折；精神创伤”，英文解释为“an unpleasant experience that makes you feel upset and/or anxious”；

2）表示“损伤；外伤”，英文解释为“an injury”举个🌰：

The patient suffered severe brain trauma.

患者的大脑受到严重损伤。

gory

表示“血淋淋的；残暴的；描述流血和暴力的”，英文解释为“involving a lot of blood or violence; showing or describing blood and violence”，如：a gory accident 流血事件。

cast doubt on

表示“对…怀有疑虑，对…表示怀疑”，英文解释为“to make something seem uncertain”举个🌰：

Witnesses have cast doubt on the accused's innocence.

证人们对嫌疑人是否清白表示怀疑。

intrusive

表示“侵入的；闯入的；侵扰的；烦扰的”，英文解释为“too noticeable, direct, etc. in a way that is disturbing or annoying”举个🌰：

The constant presence of the media was very intrusive.

媒体一直在场十分令人讨厌。

subject

表示“实验对象；研究对象”，英文解释为“In an experiment or piece of research, the subject is the person or animal that is being tested or studied.”举个🌰：

"White noise" was played into the subject's ears through headphones.

“白色噪音”通过耳机被送进实验对象的耳朵里。

trivial

表示“无关紧要的”，英文解释为“If you describe something as trivial, you think that it is unimportant and not serious.”举个🌰：

He tried to wave aside these issues as trivial details that could be settled later.

他对这些问题置之不理，视它们为可以后解决的无关紧要的细节。

wokeness

作名词，英文解释为“a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.”来源于woke，wake的过去式，表示：唤醒；激发；使…复活。

syllabi /ˈsɪləˌbaɪ/

syllabus /ˈsɪləbəs/的复数形式，表示“教学大纲”，英文解释为“A syllabus is an outline or summary of the subjects to be covered in a course.”举个🌰：

The course syllabus consisted mainly of novels by African-American authors.

该课程的教学大纲主要包括了非裔美国作家的小说。

tacit

表示“心照不宣的；不言而喻的；默示的”，英文解释为“that is suggested indirectly or understood, rather than said in words”举个🌰：

By tacit agreement, the subject was never mentioned again.

根据达成的默契，这个话题从未再提起过。

distress

表示“忧虑；悲伤；痛苦”，英文解释为“a feeling of great worry or unhappiness; great suffering”举个🌰：

The newspaper article caused the actor considerable distress.

报上的文章给这位演员带来极大的痛苦。

invalidate

表示“使无效”，英文解释为“If something invalidates something such as a law, contract, or election, it causes it to be considered illegal.”举个🌰：

An official decree invalidated the vote.

一项官方法令使投票失去了效力。

dyslexic

dyslexic /dɪsˈlɛksɪk/ 1）形容词，表示“（因脑部轻微紊乱造成的）诵读困难的”，英文解释为“If someone is dyslexic, they have difficulty with reading because of a slight disorder of their brain.”

2）也可以直接作名词，表示“诵读困难者”，举个🌰：

Many dyslexics have above-average intelligence.

很多诵读困难者的智力都在平均水平以上。

walks of life

表示“各行各业”，英文解释为“various levels of social position or achievement”，举个🌰：

In my work I see people from all walks of life.

我工作时会遇到各行各业的人士。

mirror

1）表示“反映”，英文解释为“to have features that are similar to sth else and which show what it is like”举个🌰：

The music of the time mirrored the feeling of optimism.

这个时期的音乐反映出乐观精神。

2）表示“映照；反射”，英文解释为“to show the image of sb/sth on the surface of water, glass, etc.”举个🌰：

She saw herself mirrored in the window.

她看到自己在窗玻璃上照出的影像。

Syllabus development is not typically such a hot topic, but trigger warnings have become a flashpoint in the modern-day culture wars. Proponents are branded as overly sensitive snowflakes who do too much to keep their students safe. Opponents are caricatured as Quillette-reading inhabitants of the “intellectual dark web” who want everyone to toughen up already.

flashpoint

1）表示“爆发点”，英文解释为“A flashpoint is the moment at which a conflict, especially a political conflict, suddenly gets worse and becomes violent.”举个🌰：

Tension in the city is rapidly reaching flashpoint.

这座城市处于紧张状态，大有一触即发之势。

snowflake

表示“过分敏感的人；独特/特别的人”，英文解释为“an overly sensitive or easily offended person, or one who believes they are entitled to special treatment on account of their supposedly unique characteristics”。

caricature

表示“把…画成漫画；滑稽地描述”，英文解释为“to produce a caricature of sb; to describe or present sb as a type of person you would laugh at or not respect”举个🌰：

She was unfairly caricatured as a dumb blonde.

她被不公正地丑化成了一个傻头傻脑的金发女郎。

* Quillette (/kwɪˈlɛt/) is an online magazine founded by Australian journalist Claire Lehmann. The magazine primarily focuses on science, technology, news, culture, and politics. Its editorial line is generally libertarian and is associated with the intellectual dark web.

PTSD

创伤后应激障碍（ post-traumatic stress disorder，PTSD）是指个体经历、目睹或遭遇到一个或多个涉及自身或他人的实际死亡，或受到死亡的威胁，或严重的受伤，或躯体完整性受到威胁后，所导致的个体延迟出现和持续存在的精神障碍。（百度百科）

back down

表示“（因他人反对而）放弃”，英文解释为“If you back down, you withdraw a claim, demand, or commitment that you made earlier, because other people are strongly opposed to it.”举个🌰：

It's too late to back down now.

现在打退堂鼓为时已晚。

sober

表示“持重的；冷静的”，英文解释为“(of people and their behaviour) serious and sensible”，如：a sober assessment of the situation 对形势的冷静估计，举个🌰：

He is honest, sober and hard-working.

他诚实、稳重、勤奋。

英文原文：https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/do-trigger-warnings-work/585871/

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