The Effect Of Exogenous Emotions And Endogenous Emotions Induced By Cases On The Judicial Punishment Decision

Criminal justice decision-making refers to the process that judges in criminal cases make decisions about conviction and sentence of activities according to facts of the case and relevant laws. Studies have found that extralegal factors unrelated to the case significantly affect judicial decisions, and emotion is an important one of these factors. For example, the judicial decision makers in an emotional state, eg. anger or disgust or both, are more inclined to make a conviction to the defendant. When judges or juries feel sympathetic for the victims, they may give harsher punishments to the defendants. Although a large number of previous studies have shown that emotions can affect judicial decision-making, there are still questions to be answered. First, previous studies have mainly investigated the impact of exogenous or endogenous emotions on judicial decisions separately, but few explored both together and their interactive effect on judicial decision-making process. Second, it is known that many extralegal factors unrelated to the case can affect judicial decision-making, yet it is unknown whether emotion plays a mediating role. Third, how professional legal knowledge regulates the impact of emotion on the judicial decisions also need to be further revealed.In order to answer the above questions, this study conducted four experiments. In study 1, anger, disgust, or neutral emotion was evoked by videos so as to investigate how exogenous emotions affect participants’ punishment decisions about the cases of different subjective malignancy. In Study 2, exogenous emotions induced by the same experimental procedure as study 1 and endogenous emotions evoked by cases were manipulated simultaneously to investigate their interactive effect on judicial sentences. In Study 3, the information about identity and characters of the defendants and the victims in cases was manipulated to lead to distinct subjective impression of the two parties in cases so that we investigated the influence of subjective impressions of both defendants and victims on punishment decisions and studied whether endogenous emotion functioned as an intermediate role in the decision process. Furthermore, the third study also compared the differences in judicial sentencing decision between legal and non-legal professionals. However, due to the fact that the junior students in study 3 might be not so professional in legal experiences that the difference in legal knowledge between the two groups may not be remarkable, we conducted study 4 and recruited senior students who were better trained in legal profession in order to further investigate whether legal professional knowledge affected judicial decision process by regulating emotions.The results of study 1 showed that exogenous emotions evoked by videos had no effect on punishment while the subjective malignancy of cases had significant impacted on punishment. The results of study 2 showed that there was no effect of exogenous emotions on sentencing decisions while sympathy which was endogenously induced by the defendants in cases significantly affected the punishments. The participants not only felt sympathetic for the defendants, but also felt angry and disgusted. In study 3 and study 4, we found that participants had stronger anger and disgust, but less sympathy for the defendant and gave more severe punishment in the condition of negative impression of the defendant compared with the positive condition. The results of study 3 showed that anger showed a partial mediating effect and disgust had a complete mediating effect between the subjective impression of the defendant and penalty decisions. In study 4 we found that, anger and sympathy had a partial mediating effect and disgust had a complete mediating effect between the subjective impression of the defendant and penalty decisions. Junior students gave heavier punishment in the positive impression condition than in the negative impression condition whereas no significant differences were observed in senior students. No significant differences were found in the emotional intensity between junior and senior participants. Legal professional background had no influence on sentencing decisions. Compared with legal professional participants, the non-legal professional group had higher degree of emotional arousal.To sum up, we found that exogenous emotions evoked by videos had no effect on judicial decisions but endogenous emotions induced by cases, including anger, disgust and sympathy, played an important role in punishment decisions. The legal professional background and training time had no significant impact on sentencing decisions.