The Positive and Negative Impacts of Researching Emotionally Challenging Topics

Growing evidence shows that conducting potentially emotionally challenging research may affect researchers’ wellbeing. Literature demonstrates that investigating, for example, potentially distressing topics, such as addiction (Kasseri & Tsiolis, 2025), sexual violence (Coles et al., 2014) or death and suicide (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007), or vulnerable populations, such as abused children (Perron & Hiltz, 2006) may pose challenges to researchers’ wellbeing and other aspects of life. The consequences of exposure among those interacting with traumatised individuals have variously been described as vicarious traumatisation, a concept rooted in cognitive self-development theory and centred around changes in individual’s core beliefs (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995) due to engagement with a traumatised person (or people) over time (British Medical Association, 2024); compassion fatigue, characterised by feelings of helplessness, confusion, isolation, numbness, avoidance, and persistent arousal (Adams et al., 2006; Cavanagh et al., 2020), in some cases with secondary trauma as a subset of compassion fatigue (Stamm, 2010); and secondary traumatic stress (STS), sometimes talked about as a syndrome of symptoms nearly identical to ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ (‘PTSD’; Bride, 2007), that is often seen to be as a result of extreme exposure to the trauma of others (e.g., seeing the aftermath of a traumatic event or hearing it vividly told by a traumatised person). Consistent with the latter, Sprang et al. (2019) proposed that STS is characterised by four main symptom domains, aligned with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013, 2022) for ‘PTSD’: recurring and distressing intrusions; avoidance of trauma-linked distressing thoughts, emotions, memories, or external cues linked to the traumatic event; a heightened state of arousal (e.g., hypervigilance, heightened startle responses, disrupted sleep); and negative alterations in cognitions and mood symptoms (e.g., change in emotion, impaired memory, withdrawal, negative cognitions about the self and others, existential threat). However, Stamm (2010, p.9) argues that whilst there are some nuanced differences between STS and vicarious trauma “there is no delineation between them sufficient to say that they are truly different”. Indeed, as Skinner et al. (in press) highlight, the literature on researcher wellbeing does not tend to state the persistence or the severity of the impacts that are discussed, so it is not always clear if what is being referred to as some kind of secondary or vicarious trauma response is in fact that (e.g., reoccurring distressing intrusions) or a short-term negative impact (e.g., distressing intrusions that are short lived). Given the lack of clarity in term usage in the literature, we instead here use the more general word impacts.