No more than discomfort: the trauma film paradigm meets definitions of minimal-risk research

ABSTRACT

Despite Institutional Review Board concerns about psychological harm arising from research participation, evidence from trauma-questionnaire research suggests that participation is typically well-tolerated by participants. Yet, it is unclear how participant experiences of in-lab trauma simulations align with IRB ethical guidelines. Thus, we compared reactions to a trauma film paradigm with reactions to a positive film task or cognitive tasks. Overall, relative to other conditions, the trauma film was well-tolerated by participants: they generally reported low-to-moderate negative emotions, moderate benefits, and that participation was not worse than everyday stressors. Our results have implications for the research community in designing trauma-based research.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• trauma film paradigm
• minimal risk
• trauma research

Acknowledgments

We thank Deanne Green, Robert Skurray, Diane Nayda, and Jacinta Oulton for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We chose to focus on these Western countries because this is where the majority of psychological research is currently carried out.

² As outlined in Green et al. (2016), exclusion criteria for this study were if participants had previously viewed the film or failed to follow instructions. Here, we retained all participants exposed to the tasks; thus, our final sample was N = 137.

³ We thank the reviewer who drew attention to reasons for withdrawing, which these participants did not disclose. We did not have ethical approval to ask participants this question or to contact them after their participation had concluded. Anecdotally however, participants in our other trauma analogue studies have sometimes spontaneously disclosed that they withdrew because they felt differently—more upset—than they had expected to feel when they read the warning(s) (e.g., Bridgland & Takarangi, 2021). Future research using the trauma film paradigm should explore this issue further.

⁴ Additional tasks completed here as part of the broader studies (see https://osf.io/quk8d/).

⁵ Positive and negative conditions did not significantly differ. Timing data was missing for 10 control participants, which may have contributed to these findings.

⁶ Some of these data are reported in (Green et al., 2016).

⁷ One participant did not respond to three items on the Posttest Reactions Questionnaire. We included their data for the other 46 items.

⁸ Several PANAS means were negatively skewed. The pattern of results remained unchanged following log and square root transformations, thus we report untransformed data. There were no baseline differences between conditions on positive or negative affect (ps = .450 and .663)

⁹ Three participants did not answer 1–2 items; unanswered items differed across participants. We included their data for the other 36–37 items.

¹⁰ Yeater et al. (2012) also included means for their positive condition: Ms = 1.48– 2.98.:

¹¹ We re-ran these analyses on high and low frequency events but found a similar pattern of results: see https://osf.io/quk8d/.

¹² Recall that in the present study, negative emotions represent retrospective appraisals of participation in the study via the Posttest Reactions Questionnaire (e.g., “This study was emotionally exhausting.”). In contrast, negative affect refers to the overall negative feelings participants experienced measured across the study (i.e., pre and post-participation), capturing items such as distress, feeling afraid etc.