刑事裁判判決文における各種感情への言及

抄録

This study aimed to quantitatively identify emotional words that are frequently used in criminal sentencing documents, and qualitatively identify the addressees, such as defendants, victims, and society, of these emotional words. This study analyzed 7,146 criminal sentencing texts between 1989 and 2022 that corresponded to “reasons for sentence.” For Analysis 1, sentences containing at least one of 31 emotional words were extracted based on a previous study. The result showed that the most frequently appearing word was “emotion,” followed by “fear,” “anxiety,” “regret,” “sympathy,” “sadness,” and “anger.” For Analysis 2, 100 sentences containing each of the above seven emotional words were randomly selected. Three sets of coders coded the addressees of these emotional words based on a codebook created for this study. The results showed that the characteristic emotional words for the defendant were “regret,” “sympathy,” and “anger”; for the victim, “fear,” “sadness,” and “emotion”; and for society, “anxiety.” Comparing these results with those of previous studies, the authors argued that there is a need for research that addresses “fear,” “regret,” and “punitive emotion” which have been under-researched.