Emotion: The forgotten component of legal socialization

Abstract

AbstractLegal socialization researchers have largely ignored the importance of emotion in the legal socialization process and engagement in crime. The purpose of the current study was to argue the potential importance of moral emotions (e.g., guilt) in legal socialization and take a preliminary step to integrate an emotion component into an existing model. The current study investigated whether the moral emotion of guilt, using both proneness and anticipatory measures, would predict rule‐violating behavior (RVB) as part of the integrated cognitive legal socialization model. The study used survey data from 474 participants who were part of a longitudinal study of adolescent rule‐violating behavior. Results showed that guilt proneness functioned as a predictor of RVB in parallel with legal reasoning, while anticipatory guilt served as a mediator in parallel with normative attitude mediators. Enforcement status (i.e., feeling people should be punished for committing RVB) mediated the relation between guilt proneness and RVB, while normative status (i.e., approval for engaging in RVB) and anticipatory guilt mediated the relation between legal reasoning and RVB. These findings help to advance legal socialization by demonstrating the unique contribution of emotion in legal socialization theory and provide a foundation for future research in this area. The implications for the role of emotion in both the integrated cognitive legal socialization model and the procedural justice legal socialization model and future directions for further inquiry are discussed.