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Judging Emotion In Reason: The Effect Of Emotion In The Anglo-American Legal System, Diana B. Kontsevaia

Diana Kontsevaia

The social construction of emotion shapes communities’ definitions of what is “appropriate” to feel in a given situation. The social construction of emotion is especially salient and imperative to understand in the context of the current Anglo-American legal system. In this system, the perceived cognitive separation between emotion and reason is accepted as commonly held understanding for evaluating people’s behavior, which prescribes a set of expectations that in certain cases comes forth in gendered terms. This study in cognitive anthropology explores how perceptions of the human cognitive mechanism affect how people are treated even in the allegedly most rational parts …