Do trigger warnings work?

No, according to Amna Khalid, a history professor who says she won’t be using them this year (via John McWhorter):

Trigger warnings, the results have been clear, do not reduce negative affect and emotional distress. According to a recent study by Harvard psychologists, trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.” Even worse, the researchers found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD. How’s that? Repeatedly reminded of their emotional wounds — and essentially encouraged to view new experiences through a prism of past trauma — participants came to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” The researchers concluded that, ironically, trigger warnings “may be most harmful for the individuals they were designed to protect.”

From my anecdotal observation as a professor of history, trigger warnings have not had a positive impact on the quality of education. Rather, they have become an all-too-easy excuse for students to opt-out of assignments and class sessions. And there has been a chilling effect in the classroom. Increasingly wary of teaching material that may be deemed too distressing for especially sensitive students, many educators are self-censoring....

A commenter on a public Facebook post says she’s not surprised by the study:

I have both PTSD and CPTSD and trigger warnings have always irritated me. They only succeed in bringing to mind trauma and the majority of it is completely unrelated to what the "warning" is about, for me at least. They might as well run around me in a circle ringing a bell and yelling out everything that's ever traumatized me.