Everyone's attacking Blake Lively and Colleen Hoover about trigger warnings. But... they don't work.

In the footsteps of Don't Worry Darling before it, Blake Lively's new film It Ends With Us, based on the wildly popular novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover, has launched a press tour mired in controversy, with rumours of a rift between Lively and the film's director and male lead, Justin Baldoni.

Is it a clever guerilla marketing campaign? An awkward feud gone public? Or something else altogether?

Lively, who is also a producer on the film, has—not for the first time in her career—come under fire from the internet. In spite of her 'America's Sweetheart' persona, the actress also known as Taylor Swift's famous bestie is not without her own personal history of missteps.

This time, though, the cancellation cloud seems to be sticking, thanks in part to criticism levelled at It Ends With Us (though most squarely at Lively herself) for its failure to include a trigger warning about the content of the movie, which deals with themes of domestic violence and coercive control. The uproar has intensified since Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut Blink Twice prepares to hit cinemas this week and issued its own trigger warning about the content it contains.

Watch: The importance of trigger warnings based on psychology. Post continues after video.

Do trigger warnings work?

So, should It Ends With Us include a trigger warning?

Firstly, it bears saying: the lasting impact of trauma, particularly that suffered in a violent situation, is well-documented, as is the ability of certain 'triggers' to reignite the distress of that trauma, particularly in people suffering from PTSD. As a result of this awareness, in recent years we’ve seen many media outlets and publishers take up the mantle of including warnings about potentially triggering content, to allow consumers to make an informed decision about whether to engage with it or not.

Yet recent research from Victoria Bridgland out of Flinders University suggests that perhaps, trigger warnings aren't the best way to address this very real issue - and in some instances may create more trauma through avoidance, at odds with a lot of best-practice approaches to the psychology of trauma.

"I've covered a pretty extensive number of studies now, I think we've got over 10 to 15, and there are probably a few more that have come out since we did our meta-analysis on them," says Bridgland.

"Basically, they don't really do much of anything, except to make people feel anxious when they first see them. So people see a trigger warning, they feel a little bit anxious about what's coming up, sort of like apprehension, or anticipatory anxiety, and then when people see the content after that, it doesn't reduce any negative feelings towards it. So it doesn't seem to be doing any of that emotional preparation [that people hoped it might]."

Bridgland says that not only did the groups of people interviewed involve the general population as well as trauma survivors, but it also included people with depression and anxiety to get a broad idea of how people respond to these warnings.

"We can't find any evidence for it helping any of these groups at all," concludes Bridgland.

The issue, Bridgland acknowledges, is politically charged, playing into the culture wars between progressives (a group the political Right likes to label as over-sensitive) and their conservative counterparts, who progressives believe typically eschew ideas based solely on compassion.

"It's very much tied up in all this cultural war discourse about the left and the right and 'coddled students' and 'snowflakes' and all that kind of stuff," Bridgland says.

"So when we started researching it, that was the only real discussion that was going on around these warnings, so we wanted to really apply more of a scientific lens to it and ask, what actually is happening? And it's sort of turned out that they don't really do much of anything."

And whether or not the issue of trigger warnings is central to the feelings people have about It Ends With Us and Blake Lively, it's worth considering a few of the wider issues that have led to this point, and whether or not the opinions people have are solely their own.

Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni: The drama surrounding the It Ends With Us movie.

The rumours about differences in creative opinions between Lively and her director and costar seem to be backed up by reports that the star hired her own editor to re-cut and create a different edit to Baldoni's. Apparently, both edits were tested, with Baldoni's being the more popular one, and thus being the edit that was released in theatres.

Baldoni has reportedly hired a PR crisis management team to deal with the fallout, and interestingly, most of the movie's cast - as well as Hoover - were discovered not to be following the director on social media.

Oh, and that crisis team? It includes Melissa Nathan, whose name you may remember from such calamities as the Heard v Depp defamation case - where she repped Johnny Depp.

Given that it's Baldoni's edit of the film that made the cut, it seems even more unreasonable to heap criticism on Lively for the lack of trigger warning.

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud where Mia, Holly, and Jessie unpack why Blake Lively is at the centre of mighty backlash. Post continues after podcast.

How we feel about whether or not the film should have included trigger warnings is a personal opinion, and one we are all entitled to. But if our concern about the way in which a film can negatively impact our psyches is enough to warrant a mass cancellation of its female star, it's worth looking a little deeper at the reasons why.  

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Feature image: Sony Pictures.