Trigger Warnings in Psychology Classes: What Do Students Think?Boysen, G. A., Prieto, L. R., Holmes, J. D., Landrum, R. E., Miller, R. L., Taylor, A. K., White, J. N., & Kaiser, D. J., Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology (2018).
Sensitive topics are an inherent part of psychology education, but some college students have begun to demand prior notification before the coverage of potentially disturbing content. This call from students for 'trigger warnings' has been controversial among faculty, and no research has documented psychology students’ perspectives on the topic. In order to fill this gap in knowledge, we collected data from six different psychology departments across the United States. Undergraduate psychology students (N = 751) reported their attitudes toward, and experiences with, trigger warnings in the psychology classroom. Results indicated that many psychology students held favorable views about the use of trigger warnings, viewing such warnings as necessary for topics such as sexual assault, child abuse, and suicide. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of psychology students reported little discomfort with discussing sensitive topics in class and indicated that any discomfort they felt had little or no effect on their learning. Most psychology students also agreed that potentially distressing topics have an appropriate role in the pedagogy of psychological science; that students should expect to encounter potentially disturbing content during psychology classes; and that experienced distress does not warrant student avoidance of sensitive topics. The implications of our findings for teaching are that relatively few students report the type of distress that trigger warnings are intended to prevent, but students are generally supportive should teachers choose to provide trigger warnings. However, these implications may not generalize across all types of students or institutions of higher learning.