Victim impact statements (VISs) are written or oral statements detailing the effects a crime has had on a victim. While the practice of having victims present VISs at sentencing hearings has generated much debate for over 25 years, the effects of this practice on victims, defendants, and legal decision-makers remain poorly understood. Prior research suggests that a victim’s emotional expression can affect how victims are perceived, and the legal judgments made in response to their statements. The current research considers how the effects of victims’ emotional displays on sentencing decisions might be conditioned by victim gender. Using audio-recorded VIS stimuli, the present research investigated the influence of victim gender (male vs. female) and emotional expression (Study 1: anger vs. sadness; Study 2: anger vs. sadness vs. flat affect) on legal judgments and punishment decisions. The results across Study 1 and Study 2 are inconsistent, though findings from the study (Study 2) with the substantially larger sample size suggest that individuals make legal judgments that are more favorable towards female victims, regardless of the victim’s emotion expression in a VIS. However, hostile sexism and gender-emotion stereotype endorsement moderated the effects of victim emotion expression and gender on sentence severity and empathy for a defendant.

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Resumé The subject of the thesis, "Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in the Czech Republic" has been chosen by the thesis' author for its topicality, especially considering the latest changes in the legal regulation in this area. The thesis concerns itself with recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments primarily in terms of the legal regulation and its development in the past few years; special attention is than paid to the legal regulation in the European Union, where a considerable part of the thesis is dedicated to the new Regulation Brussels I bis, effective since January 2015. Furthermore the author is writing on the rest of the European legislation, mainly various other European regulations connected with the recognition and enforcement of judgments in the European Union, such as the Regulation Brussels II bis, the Regulation on Inheritance, the Regulation on the European Enforcement Order or the Regulation on the European Payment Order. The thesis also concerns itself with comparing the previous and current legal regulation in the Czech Republic, especially the new Act on International Private Law, effective since 2014, as well as the international legal regulation, as witnessed in various bilateral and multilateral treaties. The thesis aims to offer an insight into the current...

Sripada and Konrath (forthcoming) use Structural Equation Modeling techniques to provide empirical evidence for the claim that implicit and automatic inferences about people’s dispositions, and not normative judgments, are the driving cause behind the pattern of folk judgments of intentional action in Knobe’s (2003a) chairman case. However, I will argue that their evidence is not as strong as they claim due to the potential of methodological and statistical problems with the way they tested their model. After correcting for these problems, I show that even after accounting for the role of dispositional inferences, normative judgments are still playing a significant role in folk judgments of intentional action.

Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Michael E. Young / Although risky decision-making tasks present some a priori risk (i.e., base-rate), decision makers often have an opportunity to modify this level of risk through their behaviors. Broadly speaking, risk can be modified by assigning additional resources to an ongoing task or by engaging in specific risk-mitigation strategies before or after the risky decision is made. The modification of risk requires ongoing awareness of task demands, resource constraints, and risk-mitigation strategies that can be used to adapt behavior over time. This thesis explores risk modification that occurs during difficult tasks. Difficult tasks hold greater risks because they fall at the edge of the decision maker’s abilities and are likely to require a greater number of resources to overcome. As resources are engaged they become unavailable for other tasks or strategies to cope with changing task demands. I studied how individuals monitor risks and develop risk mitigation strategies using a videogame task designed to mirror contingencies that would be encountered in the real world. Results from two experiments that involve this task suggest that decision-makers adequately monitor and develop active strategies for dealing with risks. These strategies change over time and vary as a function of task difficulty and experience.

Thesis advisor: Liane Young / Thesis advisor: James Dungan / Moral psychologists disagree over whether descriptively different moral violations represent distinct cognitive domains or are in fact unified by common cognitive mechanisms. The Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; Haidt, 2007) offers five different domains of moral transgressions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Both intentionality and omission bias (e.g. omissions such as letting someone die being judged less harshly than actions such as killing someone) have been shown to impact moral judgments; however, it remains unclear how these rules modulate judgments across moral transgressions of various types. Here, we investigate the role of intentionality and omission bias across different moral violations to determine if the divide between moral domains represent true cognitive, (as opposed to descriptive), differences. We utilized a 2 x 2 x 5 design to create stories across the 5 domains posited by MFT that were intentional/accidental cases of actions/omissions. Importantly, this study also looks at four distinct moral judgments of wrongness, responsibility, blameworthiness, and punishment to assess the role of these rules across judgments. We found that intent and action play different roles across judgments, particularly when comparing wrongness and punishment. Intent seems to matter more for wrongness, whereas action matters more for punishment. Further, these rules also differ across domains. We found that intent matters more for the individualizing foundations of harm and fairness (versus the binding foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity) in judgments of wrongness and punishment. The difference between action and omission is also more important for the individualizing foundations for punishment. These data suggest intentionality and omission bias manifest themselves uniquely across moral judgments and domains and provide evidence that there are meaningful differences between domains. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Psychology Honors Program. / Discipline: Psychology .

Emotions are ever-present, transient, and powerful mental states that become especially relevant in social situations. As humans develop, we construct lay intuitions about the nature of emotions and about how emotions function in the mind and body. Specifically, we accrue beliefs about the controllability and malleability of emotions. Entity theorists regard emotions as being relatively fixed and difficult to control. On the other hand, Incremental theorists view emotions as being relatively malleable and controllable. These dichotomous implicit theories are known to propagate different cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects. While implicit theories have been researched in the context of social judgment previously, these studies were limited to implicit theories of psychological attributes, like personality/morality/intelligence, and not theories of mental states, like emotions. In this dissertation, I draw from the various fields of cognitive science, moral philosophy, and social psychology to posit: are Implicit Theories of Emotion related to Social Judgment? And if so, what is the specific relationship between these constructs? Thus, in Study 1, I sought to answer these questions by using Tamir et al. (2017) Implicit Theories of Emotions Scale to measure emotion beliefs and by creating narrative scenarios for a blame attribution task. Study 1 also explored the relationship between Implicit Theories of Emotion and self-perceived emotion regulation tendencies, emotion regulation self-efficacy, and the perceived value of emotion regulation. The results of Study 1 demonstrated that Implicit Theories of Emotions are related to Social Judgment. Specifically, being an Incremental theorist was associated with attributing more blame to actors behaving transgressively than being an Entity theorist. This was a correlative trend reversal from the extant research that studied the relationship between Implicit Theories of Psychological Attributes (such as Personality and Morality) and Judgment. In these studies, Entity theorists tend to attribute more blame to actors behaving transgressively. Study 1 also demonstrated that that being an Incremental theorist was related to frequent use of cognitive reappraisal, having an augmented emotion regulation self-efficacy, and a perception that being able to emotionally regulate is an important human quality. In contrast, Entity theorists were associated with ascribing less blame to actors, less frequent use of cognitive reappraisal, attenuated emotion self-efficacy, and were less likely to believe that emotional self-regulation is an important quality. Study 2 measured subjects’ Implicit Theories of both Emotions and Personality and correlated these variables with blame attribution across different types of narrative scenarios. I was able to replicate the correlations from Study 1, which demonstrated that being an Incremental theorist is associated with placing harsher blame on actors behaving transgressively. Additionally, Study 2 established a causal relationship between Implicit Theories of Emotion and Social Judgment by manipulating subjects’ implicit theories using contrived scientific articles and priming activities. Participants who were taught the Entity theory of emotions attributed more blame to actors behaving transgressively than those who were taught the Incremental theory of emotions. I theorized that when people are taught a strong Entity theory of emotions, the concept of ‘emotions’ becomes more like the concept of a psychological attribute (a stable ‘trait-like’ entity). Therefore, when judging others, ‘person control’ judgment variables (such as intentionality and foreseeability) are not as relevant and these individuals become vulnerable to affect biases and to judgments based on dispositional inferences. Teaching an Incremental theory of emotions, on the other hand, had the effect of attenuating aggressive judgment. These findings have important educational and clinical implications.

Anchoring and Adjustment is a ubiquitous heuristic process in judgment and decision making. Although there is clear evidence that the anchor biases final estimates, there is disagreement about the process individuals use to arrive at the final estimate. The competing works observe the final estimates of the individuals under different conditions to find support for one or the other theory. I posit that the best way to study the mechanism in which the response is influenced is to observe the process by which participants come to the final response. In this vein, my work provides methodologies to surreptitiously observe individuals selecting the final response. My observations step towards providing a more nuanced process underlying the anchoring phenomenon. I posit that process of selecting a response by the individuals after getting influenced by the anchor is like searching for a response in the number space. I further propose that this search will be biased in systematic ways. First bias is due to the individuals’ tendency to search for a response more intensively in ‘the adjacent possible’ or the areas of search nearby the current area they are searching. I show that the search for the response is thus, dominated by adjustments to adjacent possible responses indicating a search process constrained by selective accessibility. This search will require adjustment but will be impacted by selective accessibility of the information rendered accessible by the initial anchor. Second bias is due the characteristics of the numerical search space itself. I suggest that the mental representation of numbers, just like mental representation of physical space, will have landmarks. I call them numerical landmarks. I propose that the presence of these numerical landmarks influences the individuals’ search of a response after they are influenced by an anchor. Essentially, I want to show that numerical anchors will share the characteristics of the mental representation of physical landmarks and will bias the search of an answer in the numerical space. With the help of five studies I propose to show the impact of numerical anchors on anchoring and adjustment bias and show that 1) Numerical landmarks, when presented on a scale, will grab more attention, 2) numerical landmarks are perceived to be bigger and more distinct than they actually are, and, 3) numerical landmarks act as decision nodes. Additionally, the use of relatively low-order-cognition anchoring contexts (e.g., perceptual anchoring) adds to the literature by demonstrating anchoring and adjustment bias in non-numeric domains.