Negative Emotions Felt During Trial: the Effect of Fear, Anger, and Sadness on Juror Decision Making

Abstract

During trial, jurors may experience a variety of emotions, many of which are negative. The current study examined the effects the negative emotions anger, fear, and sadness had on jurors' sentencing decisions and explored whether the cognitive appraisal theory or the intuitive prosecutor model could explain these effects. Jurors viewed the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial and were asked to sentence the defendant. Results indicated that after viewing the trial, jurors reported increased anger and sadness, but not fear. However, only change in anger affected jurors' sentences. Jurors who reported a greater change in anger were more likely to sentence the defendant to death. This effect was mediated by the level of importance that jurors placed on the prosecution's evidence and argument. Consistent with the intuitive prosecutor model, increased anger led to higher ratings of the importance of the aggravating evidence and an increase in death sentences. Implications are discussed.

The Impact of Angry Versus Sad Victim Impact Statements on Mock Jurors’ Sentencing Decisions in a Capital Trial

“…Sadness was not. Our findings were quite similar to those reported by Georges et al (2013) and Nuñez et al (2015). In both studies, mock jurors viewed the sentencing phase of a capital trial and reported increases in sadness and anger during trial, but only anger affected sentences.…”

“…However, only changes in anger predicted an increased likelihood of death sentence recommendations. In a related study, Nuñez, Schweitzer, Chai, and Myers (2015) had mock jurors rate their emotions before and after witnessing the sentencing phase of a capital trial using a portion of the PANAS-X, a measure of negative and positive affect (Watson & Clark, 1994). While this study did not specifically vary VIS, they found that mock jurors who witnessed VIS testimony reported increases in anger and sadness after watching the trial, but it was only increases in anger (not sadness) that predicted death sentences.…”

The Influence of Offender Race, Risk Level, and Participant Emotion on Juvenile Probation Case Judgments

“…One common way to manipulate incidental moods is to have participants write about a time in their life where they experienced a certain emotion, and then complete a judgment task that is not associated with their written experience (Tiedens & Linton, ). On the other hand, integral moods or emotions are directly associated with the task at hand (Angie, Connelly, Waples, & Kligyte, ; Lerner et al., ; Nuñez et al., ). For example, some researchers will ask decision makers what about a fact pattern makes them feel a certain emotion, and then ask them to make a decision about the same fact pattern.…”

“…It is possible that probation officers would not be as susceptible to emotion effects, due to their professional training. However, others have shown emotion influences the judgments of a variety of different types of actors in the criminal justice system including police (Brown & Daus, ; Wooff & Skinns, ), jurors, ( Nuñez, Schweitzer, Chai, & Myers, ; Wiener, Georges, & Cangas, ), and judges making decisions about juveniles (Eren & Mocan, ). We suspect that future studies will show that probation officers making judgments like those that our lay sample made are not immune from the negative consequences of intensified emotions like fear, especially when these emotions are evoked by those that the officers serve.…”

The effect of politician-constituent conflict on bureaucratic responsiveness under varying information frames

“…On top of ontological considerations, qualitative evidence provides for greater use of emotional cues. An ample body of literature has shown that information frames containing emotional cues are more persuasive than evidence presented without such cues (Small and Lerner, 2008;Druckman and McDermott, 2008;Arceneaux, 2012;Brader et al, 2008;Nuñez et al, 2015;Van Kleef et al, 2004;Bas and Grabe, 2016;Lau and Schlesinger, 2005). Emotive language should make citizens' demands more persuasive and thus increase responsiveness towards citizens in general.…”