Emotion and the Law

The field of law and emotion draws from a range of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to shed light on the emotions that pervade the legal system. It utilizes insights from these disciplines to illuminate and assess the implicit and explicit assumptions about emotion that animate legal reasoning, legal doctrine, the behavior of legal actors, and the structure of legal institutions. In light of law\u27s focus on influencing social norms and on structuring effective and just institutions, one development that holds enormous promise is the growing interdisciplinary interest in collective decision making and in the emotional dynamics of groups. Work in the affective sciences on how emotion and cognition interact is another rich vein for legal scholars interested in the assessment of responsibility and blame, the role of morality in law, and a host of other areas. Another important frontier is exploration of concrete solutions to the problems identified by law and emotion scholars

General Recommendations for Integrating Health Internet-Based Data in Forensic Mental Health Assessments and What We Still Need to Know

The concluding chapter of this edited book summarizes the overall purpose of book and aggregates the take-away points from individual chapters. Based on common themes highlighted in the assessment-specific chapters, this chapter discusses broader implications of using SNS and Internet-based data in the field of psychology-law and provides a more comprehensive set of practice recommendations designed to capture the unique challenges presented by online collateral sources. Finally, we propose directions for continued research with forensic clinicians, legal decision-makers, and the general public to improve our understanding about the prevalence of SNS and Internet sources in expert psycho-legal evaluations for the courts, as well as perceptions of these types of data that may influence clinical or legal outcomes

Toleration and Compassion: a Conceptual Comparison

This paper aims to explore a currently under-developed conceptual comparison between toleration and compassion. The paper clarifies the meaning of toleration and compassion, highlights a few misconceptions regarding both concepts, and describes the often overlooked differences and similarities between them. As to toleration, it entails making adverse judgement about another, having reasons to harm another, and not acting on those reasons. As to compassion, it entails witnessing the suffering of another and acting in order to alleviate this suffering. Building on these definitions, we find that both toleration and compassion can result from the same state of mind and be justified behind the ‘veil of ignorance’; both can result in the same behaviour – and be expressed simultaneously; both can be expressed by either acts or omissions; both can be exercised by the powerless; and both may be desirable under certain circumstances – yet both are not moral virtues, i.e. they are not inherently morally valuable

Remorse in Context(s)

The presence or absence of ‘signs of remorse’ is often understood to have consequences for judges’ sentencing decisions. However, these findings raise the questions, first, how ‘remorse’ is communicated and demonstrated by defendants within court settings, and second, whether remorse plays a uniform role across and between various offence and offender types. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a Dutch criminal court, we contextualize remorse to answer these questions. First, we demonstrate that the performance of remorse has to strike a fine balance between potentially competing legal and moral narrative demands. Second, we identify three different typified ‘whole-case narratives’, within which defendants’ performances of remorse assume differential levels of importance. In doing so, we seek to complicate binary portrayals of the role and consequences of remorse, arguing for a more holistic and narrative understanding of sentencing practices

Procuring Sexual Services: Evidencing Masculinity Diversity and Difference Through Sex Work Research

Masculinities theorising has promoted a traditional view of maleness, conceptualising it as being dominant, successful and non-emotional; that is hegemonic masculinity. Contemporary work on men and their behaviour, recognising need and emotions, has been classified as subordinate to hegemonic masculinity. We examine the procurement of sexual services by a cohort of heterosexual men in New South Wales, Australia arguing that our findings support contemporary masculinity writings. Our analysis suggests that men seek and obtain intimacy and emotional experiences through procurement of sex, while at the same time reflecting some hegemonic masculine characteristics. We conclude by arguing that research with men who procure sexual services provides new insights into masculinities theorising recognising difference and diversity in what it is to be a man in the twenty-first century