Many injustices and unfair judgments occur within legal systems that adopt the classical view of emotions. This view assumes that we possess innate, animalistic emotions that are governed by rational thought. These injustices manifest in judicial rulings in cases where defendants are punished far beyond what they deserve, according to this classical perspective.<\/p>\n
What we share in Arab countries with American law is a bias toward the killer when it comes to marital infidelity, as clearly illustrated when Lisa Feldman Barrett describes what are known as “crimes of passion.” The law assumes that the human mind is a battlefield between reason and emotion. This allows defendants to claim diminished criminal responsibility (such as reducing a charge of premeditated murder) if they were provoked, claiming that an uncontrollable “rage” hijacked their rational minds. According to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion, emotions are not primitive reactions that hijack behavior, and anger does not have a single, uncontrollable biological fingerprint. You construct your emotions just as you construct your thoughts, which means you possess a greater degree of control and responsibility than the law assumes.<\/p>\n
In other cases, the legal system expects judges to curb their personal inclinations and issue emotion-free rulings using pure reason. However, the brain’s architecture makes this biologically impossible. Since body-budgeting regions drive predictions throughout the brain, no decision can be completely free from emotional influence. When judges attempt to ignore this, they fall victim to “affective realism,” where their bodily states (such as hunger) unconsciously influence their legal verdicts.<\/p>\n
The gold standard of a jury trial relies heavily on jurors detecting emotions like remorse in a defendant. The classical view assumes that remorse has a universal, recognizable expression in the face and body. In reality, jurors are merely making “mental inferences” (guesses) through the lens of their own cultural concepts. This can lead to tragic misunderstandings, especially when the defendant belongs to a culture with different emotional norms, such as stoicism and calmness in the face of adversity. Studies on people attempting to guess others’ emotions show that the accuracy of these guesses is incredibly low; yet, in many judicial systems, “remorse” is highly valued as an emotional indicator by both judges and juries.<\/p>\n
The law judges defendants according to the standard of a “reasonable person,” a metric heavily reliant on classical emotional stereotypes, as if a standard blueprint for a normal or rational person exists. Because of these stereotypes, the law treats male and female defendants unequally. For example, a murdering husband is viewed as acting out of stereotypical male aggression, but female victims of domestic violence who defend themselves with anger (rather than passive fear) violate female stereotypes and are routinely punished far more harshly. There are many documented cases where women have been severely punished for defending themselves against spousal violence.<\/p>\n
Lawyers are increasingly using neuroscience to argue that a specific “aberrant brain blob” (such as an enlarged insula) caused the defendant’s violent behavior, thereby mitigating their responsibility. However, this relies on a baseless pseudoscience called “blob-ology.” Complex psychological categories like aggression cannot be localized to a single cluster of neurons, and variations in brain structure do not automatically absolve a person of responsibility for a crime.<\/p>\n
Misunderstanding emotional harm is another flaw, as the law treats emotional damage as less serious and less tangible than physical tissue damage, enforcing a false boundary between mind and body. However, scientific evidence shows that prolonged emotional harm, such as chronic stress or severe bullying, can physically alter the brain, cause illness, and even shorten a person’s lifespan by wearing down telomeres (the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes).<\/p>\n
The legal system is moving slowly toward accepting that human memory is not like a video recording; rather, it is a simulation constructed in the moment and highly susceptible to distortion. Furthermore, the law conflates the actual capacity to choose an action with the subjective experience of feeling in control. In a predictive brain, responsibility extends far beyond the exact moment a crime is committed; you are also responsible for the cultural concepts and stereotypes you allow to be programmed into your brain, because those concepts ultimately drive your predictions and actions.<\/p>\n
This article is part of a series of articles on the Theory of Constructed Emotion.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many injustices and unfair judgments occur within legal systems that adopt the classical view of emotions. This view assumes that we possess innate, animalistic emotions that are governed by rational thought. These injustices manifest in judicial rulings in cases where defendants are punished far beyond what they deserve, according to this classical perspective. What we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":267801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5254,5251],"tags":[],"authorship_type":[5108],"class_list":["post-267802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-science-and-society","authorship_type-5108"],"yoast_head":"\n