the value of emotional resilience

“Trogger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead”:

Participants in the trigger warning group believed themselves and people in general to be more emotionally vulnerable if they were to experience trauma. Participants receiving warnings reported greater anxiety in response to reading potentially distressing passages, but only if they believed that words can cause harm. Warnings did not affect participants’ implicit self-identification as vulnerable, or subsequent anxiety response to less distressing content… .

Trigger warnings may inadvertently undermine some aspects of emotional resilience. Further research is needed on the generalizability of our findings, especially to collegiate populations and to those with trauma histories.

Right — but what if you don’t think that being emotionally resilient is desirable? What if emotional resilience is perceived as a failure to feel pain with sufficient intensity?