“I'm always curious”: Tracking young adults exposure and responses to social media trigger warnings in daily life

Trigger warnings are alerts that intend to help people emotionally prepare for, or avoid, potentially distressing material likely to trigger memories or emotions related to past experiences. Lab studies suggest that warnings overwhelmingly result in approach behaviour rather than avoidance. However, no research to date has tracked exposure and responses to trigger warnings in daily life. Here 261 young adults (aged 17–25) completed a 7-day daily diary study in which they tracked exposure to trigger warnings on social media and reported if they approached or avoided the content marked by the warnings. Because trigger warnings are intended for use by certain groups of vulnerable people (e.g., trauma survivors/people with mental health concerns), we also measured various psychopathological characteristics (posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] symptoms, trauma exposure, etc.). Consistent with lab-based studies, we found that most people (∼90 %) reported approaching content marked by a trigger warning, and most commonly did so out of “curiosity”. Moreover, only ∼10 % of participants reported always avoiding content marked by a trigger warning when they saw it—signalling a tendency to approach warned material in the real world. We also found no relationship between self-reported avoidance of content marked with trigger warnings that was encountered in daily life and any mental health risk marker (e.g., PTSD symptoms, trauma exposure). Our findings therefore further question claims that trigger warnings are an effective online mental health intervention.