Jurors’ emotional state, attentional focus, and judicial judgment in a criminal court

ABSTRACT

In order to consider the relevant relationships between emotion, information processing and judicial judgment, this study evaluated the impact of positive (amusement), negative (sadness) or neutral mood induction on 128 mock jurors’ visual attentional focus, as measured by their eye fixations on the face of a witness filmed while giving testimony in a criminal court. Participants then rated their perceptions of the witness's and their own emotions on the Differential Emotional Scale, before indicating their final judicial judgment. As expected, results showed that sadness can favour information processing in a in more effortful mode, with more steady visual attention, while a positive emotional state such as amusement can favour information processing based more on the witness's emotions, a source of useful clues for establishing the judicial judgment. These results are discussed in relation to how the cognitive approach can shed light on the processes underlying judicial judgment.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional state
• emotional facial expression
• visual attention
• judicial judgment

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 One of the features of civil law legal systems is the mixed jury, made up of both lay and professional judges (i.e. jurors and magistrates). A cursory review of the various types of lay participation shows that mixed courts differ across European criminal justice systems based on civil law. In French Assize Courts, where criminal cases are tried, three professional judges (the president of the court and two assessors) sit alongside six jurors at first instance level, and nine jurors at appeal level.

2 The intimate conviction instruction, one of the features of legal systems based on civil law, governs the decision-making process in most continental judicial systems (e.g. France, Germany and Belgium). This instruction refers to a decision principle whereby magistrates and jurors have “to question themselves in silence and reflection and to seek in the sincerity of their conscience what impression has been made on their reason by the evidence brought against the accused and the arguments of his defense” (Article 353 of the French Code of Criminal Procedure).