Trigger Warning: More Empirical Evidence For The Priming Effects Of Trigger Warnings Ahead

The use of trigger warnings and microaggressions within a university setting has recently become the center of controversy. The current study sought to examine the degree to which trigger warnings influenced participants’ perceptions towards potentially distressing and/or socially discriminatory literary passages. 128 participants, recruited from Amazon mTurk, completed a survey in which they read 3 pre-manipulation passages, 7 passages during the manipulation (half of the participants received trigger warnings before each of these passages and the other half did not) and 3 post-manipulation passages. Results showed that participants who received trigger warnings evaluated the post-manipulation microaggressive passage and email as less discriminatory, but evaluated the post-manipulation mildly distressing passage as more discriminatory. Potential explanation and implications surrounding these findings is offered in the discussion section.