Trigger warnings said to harm college students, but evidence is thin

July 30, 2018 • 9:00 am

“Trigger warnings” are of course cautionary statements given out, usually by college professors, before they present disturbing material to students. The intent is to prevent those who might have been traumatized by that subject or a related one (usually people with PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder) from being re-traumatized.

My view of such warnings is that material that might be disturbing to everyone should be preceded by a caution (e.g., an ISIS beheading video, other gory stuff or crimes like rape), and that the professor should announce to the class at the beginning of the semester that if anyone has trigger issues, they should come to see the professor and get a list of course material that they might find offensive. But I also think that students should still be responsible for mastering “triggering” material presented in class, that students with trigger issues should be seeing a therapist, and that, in the long run, trigger warnings aren’t helpful in curing the individual of their phobias (psychologists think that one must be exposed to material to get over being triggered by it).

Further, trigger warnings might serve to keep the traumatized student in a status of perpetual victimhood. Finally, the list of stuff that has been deemed potentially triggering is so long that it’s impossible to give warnings in advance about every possible cause of anxiety. Here, for instance, is a list from a sympathetic intersectional website:

One simply can’t warn people about all that stuff in advance!

A new paper, which has been given publicity by lots of right-wing websites, piqued my interest, as it purported to show, according to those sites, that trigger warnings don’t work. Unfortunately, it shows nothing of the sort—only that trigger warnings can temporarily increase one’s sense of vulnerability in non-traumatized people exposed to disturbing prose.

Here’s the paper (click on screenshot to get to article, free pdf is here, and the reference is below). The paper is by Benjamin Bellett, Payton Jones, and Richard McNally, all at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, and it’s in a reputable journal: Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

The title is cute, but what did the researchers do? They exposed 270 people recruited on the internet to prose passages considered either neutral, mildly distressing, or markedly distressing. These weren’t mostly college students, as the median age of subjects was 37 (see paper for other characteristics). Here’s what the authors say about the passages:

To simulate an academic setting, we chose passages from world literature that commonly appear in high school or college courses. Each passage was standardized in word length, and passage exposures were set to a minimum of 20 s before participants were allowed to continue to the next screen. Transparent attention checks based on the passages’ content assessed whether participants were attentively reading the passages (see supplementary materials S2 for an example of a content check question). We used three types of passages. Neutral passages were devoid of disturbing content (e.g. a character description from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick). Mildly distressing passages concerned themes of violence, injury, or death, but lacked graphic details (e.g. a description of a battle from James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers). Markedly distressing passages contained graphic descriptions of violence, injury, or death (e.g. the murder scene from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment). See supplementary materials (S1) for a sample passage from each category.

Subjects with PTSD or who said they had trauma issues were excluded from the study. The authors also surveyed the subjects’ demographics (sex, race, ethnicity, political stance etc.) and attitudes, like whether they believed in advance that words could cause harm and whether they thought trigger warnings should be used (80% said yes in advance). Participants were also asked if they had any history of psychiatric disorders.

They then exposed the subjects to three mildly distressing passages to get a baseline anxiety level. After that, they read ten passages in random order: five were markedly distressing and five were neutral. Half the subjects were given a trigger warning before reading the distressing passages (“The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma”) and half were not. The subjects were then assessed for various psychological variables, and multiple regression analyses were use to tease out the effects of single factors.

Here are the most important results:

  • Students who got trigger warnings saw themselves as “more vulnerable to suffering persistent negative emotional effects in the event of experiencing trauma”. That is, they say themselves as having become more easily traumatized. But this effect was small: the increase in level of vulnerability was only 5.2% and the probability that this was true under the null hypothesis of no effect was less than 0.05 but not much lower. That’s not considered a very significant effect, nor is it a large one.

 

  • More students who got trigger warnings believed afterwards that “trauma survivors would suffer persistent emotional effects” than did the controls who didn’t get warnings. But again this effect was small (5.4% increase in strength of that belief), and p<0.05, again not a hugely significant result. They also didn’t correct statistically for multiple comparisons, which would probably make these effects nonsignificant.

These two results are the basis of media reports that trigger warnings were harmful, but of course you can see the problems: not college students, self-report, small and likely nonsignificant effects. Hardly the stuff of headlines. Here are a couple other results:

  • Participants who believed in advance that words can cause harm had a significantly higher increase in anxiety from receiving trigger warnings than the un-warned controls. Again the effect is barely significant (p , 0.05), although the result makes sense.

 

  • Factors that made people who got trigger warnings even more likely to see themselves as more vulnerable included being a woman, a member of a racial minority, a liberal, a younger person, and, especially strongly, one with a psychiatric diagnosis that did not include PTSD. These all conform to our expectations or to previous results; the psychiatric diagnosis effect was especially significant (p < 0.001, but not significant for the second test of assessing the vulnerability of other people).

This study, I think, says very little about whether trigger warnings work, for those warnings are used to prevent people with PTSD or diagnosed trauma from being re-traumatized without warning. Those kind of subjects weren’t used in this study. Further, the effects were small, so they don’t even convince me that “trigger warnings don’t work and can even be harmful”. To be fair, the authors list a number of problems with the study at the end of their paper, including the fact that they used reading passages and not visual images or representations. All they can really conclude is that “Trigger warnings do not appear to be conducive to resilience as measured by any of our metrics. . . and may present nuanced threats to selective domains of psychological resilience.”

So this is a start, but what we really want to know is whether trigger warnings are helpful to traumatized individuals, and whether they can contribute to de-traumatizing them over the long run. There’s simply not much data on this issue, though the authors mention a poster—not a published paper—by Bruce (reference below) suggesting that physiological markers of anxiety in traumatized individuals were heightened after presentation of a trigger warning compared to “no warning” controls. That, too, suggests that trigger warnings might not be helpful.

So caveat lector.  While the headlines may be comforting to those who don’t like trigger warnings, the data in the paper don’t show that these warnings don’t work—at least when they’re used on traumatized individuals, as is their purpose. And headlines like the one below, from the right-wing website The College Fix, are simply misleading (click on screenshot to read the piece):

________

Bellet, B. W., P. J. Jones, and R. J. McNally. 2018. Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, in press.

 

Poster said to show negative effects of trigger warnings on traumatized individuals:

M.J. Bruce.  2017. Predictors of trigger warning use: Avoidance or asserting accommodation needs? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the international society of traumatic stress studies, Chicago, IL (2017, November)

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 30, 2018 • 7:30 am

Once again we have a nice science-and-photo post by biology professor Bruce Lyon from the University of California at Santa Cruz. His notes are indented, and the subject is owls, also known as Honorary Cats™.

A second batch of owl photos and natural history to follow on the Northern Pygmy Owl post (here) from a couple of weeks ago. To contrast with the pygmy owl, here are some photos of a very large species, the Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulas), the tallest North American owl. Their height is deceptive thought because under all those feathers is a puny body—despite being five inches longer than Great Horned Owls (see post about them here), Great Grays Owls are 15% lighter than great horneds.

Below: a comparison of the heads of great grays (left) and great horns (right) reveals another important size difference—great grays have very small eyes. I do not know if this is just a consequence of great grays having smaller heads when the feathers are removed (i.e., skull size), or whether, relative to skull size, they have smaller eyes. I suspect they do. They often hunt during the day, so diurnal hunting might not require large eyes. And the fact that they can find prey based on sound may make the eyes less important for hunting than for great horns. I do not know if great horneds can hunt by sound alone but I suspect not. Their facial disc is not as well developed as the great gray and they also have bilaterally symmetric ear openings.

Great Gray Owls are one of my favorite birds, period! They seem mystical with their huge heads and facial discs, and they have a slow flapping flight that is almost butterfly like. They also live in beautiful wild areas that have a mix of coniferous forest and meadows for hunting. Small rodents (voles, mice, lemmings) comprise the bulk of their diet (90-95% depending on location). It’s amusing to think that tiny pygmy owls often take larger prey.

Below: A great gray owl hunting in a burned-out forest not too far from Yosemite National Park this spring. Hunting involves sitting on a perch for a long period of time and then gliding down and pouncing on prey.

Below: When the owls are sitting still next to the trunks of large trees they can be remarkably cryptic. Another owl near Yosemite.

Below: The same bird hunting in a meadow. It is much more conspicuous than in the above photo but they can still be surprisingly easy to miss even when out in meadows.

These owls can hunt entirely by hearing, and the big facial disk apparently serves as a parabola to focus sound on the asymmetric ears used to triangulate and pinpoint the location of a sound source. In winter, the owls can locate mice hidden under the snow and then glide to the area and punch down hard through the snow to snatch the rodent. They are deadly accurate. A friend who watches gray grays in winter in Canada has several times had an owl glide in from a perch a hundred meters away and then punch through the snow and grab a mouse a mere couple of feet from where he was standing. These birds can be extremely tame and apparently can hear mice from a long distance away. Below is video clip from National Geographic showing a bird hunting in winter.

These owls breed in the forest near the wetlands where I do my coot research in central British Columbia but it took me many years to find a nest. Great gray nests can be found by following an adult returning to the nest with prey.  I found my owl nest by watching a great gray catch a mouse in a meadow and then fly off into the woods. I knew it was going to its nest so I sprinted after it for about 400 meters but then lost sight of it as it disappeared in the fairly dense forest.  On whim, I continued on in the same trajectory the bird had been going and after 300 more meters I encountered the bird now flying back towards me in the opposite direction. I went another 200 meters to where the bird had flown from and heard the faint calls of a female calling from the nest and her calls led me to the nest (she was probably telling the male to keep hunting). Unfortunately, the nest was in the worst possible location for observing or taking photos: it was in an old raven nest very well hidden at the top of a tall spruce. However, once the chicks fledged I was able to get great views of the family hanging out—this pair of birds was completely oblivious to people.

Below: Look at the massive head on this bird! I think it hears a mouse.

Below: The same bird. This bird has heard something rustle in the underbrush and has gone into what I call ‘mouse mode’. They often have a relaxed posture but when they hear something that could be rodent, their comportment changes—they stare intensely at the source of the sound and their entire posture changes and they often cock their head back and forth, presumably to pinpoint the location of the sound.

Below: The same bird hunting in the forest in the early evening when the light was quite nice.

Below. Something suspicious has been detected and the bird launches for a pounce.

Below: One of the three chicks out of the nest. Owl chicks often leave the nest before they can fully fly. They scramble around the branches and are sometimes called ‘branchers’ at this stage.

Below: One of the fledgling next to the trunk of a very large Douglas fir. Although the birds nested in a tall spindly spruce, there were lots of large Douglas fir nearby. This nice patch of woods has since been logged.

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

July 30, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday, July 30, 2018, the penultimate day of the month, and National Cheesecake Day. It’s also the International Day of Friendship, celebrated most vigorously in South America. I am down to six ducks: five ducklings plus Honey, and will do another census when I feed them in an hour. One thing’s for sure: I’ll have Honey for a while longer, as she is only now growing flight feathers after her molt.

On this day in 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, Virginia, met for the first time. And on this day in 1930, Uruguay won the first FIFA World Cup in its home town of Montevideo. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it, and I’ve put in a short video:

The first FIFA World Cup™ was one of a kind. Taking place wholly in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, the sport’s inaugural showpiece was rich in details that might bemuse the modern football fan: four teams arriving together on the same boat, an unfinished stadium, even a one-armed goalscorer in the Final. Yet it ended with a familiar outpouring of joy as the whole of Uruguay took a public holiday after La Celeste became the first world champions by defeating neighbours Argentina 4-2.

On July 30, 1956, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the Congressional resolution making “In God we Trust” the U.S. National Motto. Oy gewalt! Exactly six years later, the Trans-Canada Highway, the longest national highway on the planet, was officially opened.  And on this day in 1965, Lyndon Johnson created a huge feat of socialism, signing into law the Social Security Act of 1965, which included Medicaid and Medicare.  On July 30, 1966, England defeated West Germany 4-2 in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final (played in London) in extra time. Here’s a 9.5-minute video of that dramatic match.

On this day in 1974, President Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon turned over the subpoenaed White House “Watergate tapes” to the special prosecutor after the U.S. Supreme Court said he had to.  One year later, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of a restaurant outside Detroit, Michigan, and was never seen again. His fate remains a mystery. Finally, on July 30, 2003, the last Volkswagen Beetle made in the old style rolled off a Mexican assembly line.

Notables born on July 30 include Emily Brontë (1818), Thorstein Veblen (1857), Henry Ford (1863), Casey Stengel (1890), Henry Moore (1898), Buddy Guy (1936), Peter Bogdanovich (1939), Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947), Hilary Swank (1974), Misty May-Treanor (1977) and Hope Solo (1981). Those who expired on this day include William Penn (1718), George Pickett (1875), Claudette Colbert (1996), “Buffalo Bob” Smith (1998), and Michelangelo Antonioni (2007).

Moore did drawings as well as sculptures; here’s his “Jaguar”, drawn in 1981:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again fixated on noms:

Hili: We can talk about it at lunch.
A: Talk about what?
Hili: What’s for dinner..
In Polish:
Hili: Możemy o tym porozmawiać przy lunchu.
Ja: O czym?
Hili: Co będzie na obiad?

Some tweets from Matthew. First, street violence in Sweden.

https://twitter.com/Agha_Zadeh/status/1023290165622652931

More hares, this time in England:

Matthew explains the tweet below: “Phymata are assassin bugs, and their minds are always killing, even if they are otherwise occupied… Milichids are kleptoparasitic flies.”

Matthew says, “Watch until the end”:

https://twitter.com/RelktntHero/status/1023371591701409794

Not a leaf. What is it?

It’s this, a near-perfect example of mimicry:

This question is a bit confusing, but make a guess about where the heart might be:

From reader Gethyn:

Some tweets from Grania:

https://twitter.com/OregonJOBS2/status/1023009268939677696

This will probably be too late, as the poll expires in ten hours (I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon), but see the vote. I’d take physical immortality any day, though the conditions of aging and other stuff need to be specified.

Look at that d*g’s face!

https://twitter.com/PopularPups/status/1023052916243025922

A decent science pun:

The second tweet is the one to look at:

Finally, a cartoon, also contributed by Grania:

 

Sunday: Duck report (with fledging)

July 29, 2018 • 3:00 pm

Three of the ducklings have left the pond, apparently permanently (they were not there this morning or this afternoon). Five are left along with Honey. The smaller hen Phoebe is still timorous and hard to feed, which makes me anxious. I hope the other ducks go on their way soon so I can take proper care of her.

Pictures tomorrow.

Where did they go? I don’t know. Will I ever see them again? I doubt it. But I can take satisfaction in knowing that I helped get them strong and healthy for their migration.

It’s always the Jews’ fault

July 29, 2018 • 2:15 pm

I’m sick unto death of comments like this. This person, and I’ll withhold the expletives here, thinks it’s the Jews’ fault that they’re the victims of anti-Semitism around the world. Since when has it been okay to commit crimes or harass a group because of what some other members of that group are purported to do? It’s as if it’s okay to commit hate crimes against Muslims because of what ISIS does.

I’m sorry, but I can’t think of this person as anything but an anti-Semite, ready to say that because of Israel, Jews around the world deserve what befalls them.

I’m too weary to deal with this, so I’ll throw it to the readers. Right now I have ducks to feed: a genuinely pleasurable experience.

Worst restaurant items in America

July 29, 2018 • 12:30 pm

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has given out its Xtreme Eating Awards for 2018, and, I found some of these beyond belief. Now if you’re a regular here you know that I occasionally eat large meals, especially on vacation, and sometimes food considered “bad”, like rib tips and fries. But more often I eat healthier, and am doing so even more since I started fasting two days a week (I have lost considerable weight and am considering cutting back on the fasting). Today, for instance, I had a latte with 2% milk for breakfast, a salad and an apple with lunch, and tonight I’ll have an omelet with green peppers and some baguette, as well as a glass of decent wine. But if I couldn’t binge out once in a while, I’d consider life not worth living.

But here are some items that stretch the boundaries of badness. Have a look at the page, but here are some of the CSPI’s winners, along with their rationale (just below):

Each of these restaurant items manages to cram in close to a day’s calories, often accompanied by at least a day’s saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar.

That’s not easy. After all, a typical restaurant entrée has “only” about 1,000 calories. That’s one reason why “only” two out of three adults and one out of three children or teens are overweight or obese. But these dishes go the extra mile…just so more of us can start looking for extra-large-size apparel.

THE WINNER (for calories). I have to say, though, that I’d probably eat this as a binge food:

 

This one surprised me. When I was a kid in Germany, I used to eat soft pretzels, but haven’t had any in America that are close to the German version. Plus I almost never eat at the movies:

Now this doesn’t appeal to me at all, and look at the food-equivalent at the bottom:

Now, some of my guilty pleasures: An entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (I haven’t done this for a while), the large rib tips with mild sauce and fries at Uncle J’s BBQ on 47th Street (eaten as two meals), the giant Costco apple pie (eaten in about six goes).

I believe it was A. J. Liebling who said his aspiration was to think, on his deathbed, that “There have been kings who haven’t eaten as well as I.” And that’s the way he went!

76 merganser chicks in the Big Parade

July 29, 2018 • 10:15 am

I’ve been sent this story and photo by many readers, and have delayed putting it up. Could it be I was miffed because this duck outdid Honey? At any rate, the photo of a common merganser hen (Mergus merganser) with a train of 76 ducklings has gone viral. The story and one likely explanation is recounted in the New York Times piece (click on the screenshot to see it):

 

Why is this so popular? Three reasons, I think. The least of them is probably that this is an almost unprecedented number of ducklings tended by one hen. The other reasons are anthropomorphic: we see a huge number of cute baby ducks following mom in a neat line, and we emphathize with a mother who tends all those babies. A minor reason may be because the layperson has a scientific curiosity about how this can happen. But what do I know; I’m just an average Joe who does genetics.

At any rate, some excerpts from the NYT piece, with one explanation below:

Where she goes, they follow. All 76 of them.

A female duck in Minnesota has about six dozen ducklings in her care, a remarkable image that an amateur wildlife photographer captured on a recent trip to Lake Bemidji, about 150 miles northwest of Duluth, Minn.

“It was mind blowing,” the photographer, Brent Cizek, said in an interview. “I didn’t know that a duck could care for that many chicks.”

It’s not unusual to see many ducklings gathered together. Some 20 or 30 have been reported with a single hen. But 70-plus?

Here’s Cizek’s tweet:

Another excerpt:

The females at Lake Bemidji, many of which are related, lay eggs that hatch around the same time, he said. Afterward, he said, the adult ducks go off to molt their feathers, leaving their broods in the care of a matriarchal female.

“She’d be kind of like the great-grandmother,” Mr. Rave said.

While the practice is common for this species, Mr. Rave said, the size of the crèche in the photo is exceptional. “That’s a lot,” he said. “I’ve seen crèches up to 35 and 50 often, but 70 — that would be a very big crèche.”

Mr. Cizek, the photographer, has gone back to the lake several times to photograph the ducklings as they grow. He said he had seen other adult ducks around the brood, but when Mama swims away, the ducklings follow her.

“Everybody is really just amazed,” Mr. Cizek said. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘Mom of the Year.’”

Now that of course is not necessarily an explanation, for we want to know why this female duck tends so many young. After all, if none of them are her offspring, she has nothing to lose by flying off—unless they contain some of her genes, as suggested by the fact that some of the mothers are related, and may be related to “SuperMom”. We could test that by seeing if this kind of phenomenon is more common in lakes where females are more related. Alternatively, it’s her brood in there, too, and she simply has no way of cutting out the others, while other ducks have everything to gain by parasitizing the care of another female.  I’ll write Bruce Lyon, our Official Website Ornithologist™, to get his take on this.

More photos are here, including this one: