Trigger Warnings: Are They the Aesthetic Equivalent of Eating Your Vegetables First?
Wednesday, March 12, 2025.
Somewhere in the not-too-distant past, society decided that art—this deeply human, messy, sometimes disturbing thing—needed safety labels.
And so, in an act of bureaucratic benevolence, we started pasting trigger warnings onto paintings, as if viewers were hapless toddlers about to stick their fingers into an electrical socket.
But a new study in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts suggests that this grand exercise in preemptive emotional coddling might actually be making art worse—or at least, making people enjoy it less.
The research found that when people viewed paintings accompanied by content warnings, they rated the artwork as less attractive, less pleasant, and more emotionally distressing than if they’d simply been left alone to form their own impressions.
And the best part? Not a single person opted to skip viewing the allegedly distressing artwork. Not one.
Which means the entire Woke premise of these warnings—“helping people avoid upsetting material”—is about as useful as a sign in a public park that says, Warning: Possible Buzzing of Bees.
Trigger Warnings: The Art Appreciation Equivalent of a Wet Blanket
Once upon a time, people went to art galleries, looked at paintings, and if they found something upsetting, they either coped like adults or wrote an angry letter to The New York Times.
But in our current Age of Emotional Hyperawareness™, we’ve decided that people must be prepared before encountering challenging material. The idea is that by preemptively labeling a painting as dangerous, we give people the chance to regulate their emotions. Truly an absurd idea.
The problem? That’s not at all how human psychology works.
Previous studies have already cast serious doubt on whether trigger warnings do anything useful (Bridgland et al., 2019).
While they increase anticipatory anxiety, they don’t significantly change avoidance behavior, nor do they reduce emotional distress once a person actually sees the material. In other words, they function like someone telling you “Hey, don’t freak out, but…”—which is, of course, a surefire way to make someone freak out.
The Experiment: Let’s See If We Can Ruin Art for People
For this study, researchers recruited 213 participants and showed them six randomly selected paintings. Some of these paintings came with trigger warnings describing their potentially sensitive subject matter. Others were presented without any warning at all, just the usual title and artist information.
One of the paintings used was Phryne before the Areopagus (1861) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a neoclassical depiction of the famous courtesan Phryne standing trial in ancient Greece.
Half of the participants saw it with this ominous label:
“Content warning: sexual assault.”
The other half got no such warning. They just saw a painting of a mostly naked woman in a courtroom, as Gérôme intended.
Afterward, participants rated the artwork’s attractiveness, interestingness, and emotional impact. They were also given the option to skip viewing the artwork entirely, just in case they wanted to exercise their God-given right to avoid confronting difficult imagery.
The Results: Congratulations, We’ve Made Art Less Enjoyable
As any rational person might have predicted:
The Warnings Made the Art Less Appealing – Participants who saw trigger warnings rated the paintings as less beautiful, less pleasant, and less engaging. The warning didn’t enhance appreciation. It didn’t encourage deeper thought. It just made people go, “Ugh, this is bad.”
People Felt Worse – Instead of allowing viewers to experience art naturally, trigger warnings primed them for distress. Participants reported feeling more sadness, more anger, and more anxiety when the painting came with a warning. The mere suggestion that something might be upsetting made it upsetting—a neat little psychological trick known as expectancy bias (Wilson et al., 2018).
Avoidance? Not Even Once – Despite the hand-wringing about “protecting vulnerable viewers,” not a single person in the study chose to skip the artwork. Zero. Zilch. Which means that either people don’t actually want to avoid difficult content, or they simply ignore these warnings altogether—rendering the entire concept functionally useless.
The Problem with Treating Art Like It’s Radioactive
This study confirms what anyone with a functional brain stem could have guessed: telling people that something is dangerous makes them approach it differently—not with curiosity, but with hesitation and discomfort.
It’s as if someone sat down and thought, How can we make people engage with art in the most sterile, hyper-cautious, anxiety-ridden way possible? And then they invented trigger warnings.
The whole point of art is that it’s supposed to provoke emotions. Duh.
Sometimes those emotions are good.
Sometimes they’re uncomfortable.
That’s the deal.
If you need a warning before engaging with it, you might as well walk around an art museum wearing noise-canceling headphones and dark sunglasses.
But beyond the sheer absurdity of it, there’s an even deeper issue: this is yet another example of how modern culture infantilizes people under the guise of protecting them.
Do we need warning labels on books now? “Caution: This novel contains themes of existential dread.”
How about music? “Warning: This song contains melancholy chord progressions.”
Should museums start handing out emotional safety goggles at the front desk?
This isn’t about “helping” people.
It’s about micromanaging emotional responses—flattening human experience into something predictable, sanitized, and entirely fu*king joyless.
Maybe We Should Just Trust People to Be Adults
The researcher behind the study, Payton Jones, summed it up best:
“People who put trigger warnings on art never intend to take away from the art’s beauty—but that’s the result.”
In other words, it’s a well-intentioned but ultimately self-defeating exercise. Much like helicopter parenting, it assumes that people are too fragile to handle the world on their own, so we must bubble-wrap reality to keep them from scraping their knees.
What’s next? A trigger warning for Starry Night? “Warning: May evoke feelings of existential longing and the crushing awareness of cosmic insignificance.”
Art is meant to be experienced, not pre-digested.
If a painting disturbs you, good.
That means it’s doing its job.
If you don’t like it, walk away. But let’s stop pretending that trigger warnings enhance anything. They don’t.
At best, they make people feel worse. At worst, they rob art of its power.
If you need a content warning before visiting an art museum, I have one for you:
“Caution: This gallery contains the human condition.”
Handle with care. Or don’t. Either way, you’ll be fine.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bridgland, V. M. E., Jones, P. J., & Bellet, B. W. (2019). The impact of trigger warnings on emotional reactions and engagement with material. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(2), 136-147.
Wilson, T. D., Gilbert, D. T., & Centerbar, D. B. (2018). Affective forecasting and the psychology of happiness. Annual Review of Psychology, 69(1), 71-97.