Emotional memories are vivid and lasting but not necessarily accurate. Under some conditions, emotion even increases people’s susceptibility to false memories. This review addresses when and why emotion leaves people vulnerable to misremembering events. Recent research suggests that pregoal emotions—those experienced before goal attainment or failure (e.g., hope, fear)—narrow the scope of people’s attention to information that is central to their goals. This narrow focus can impair memory for peripheral details, leaving people vulnerable to misinformation concerning those details. In contrast, (...) postgoal emotions—those experienced after goal attainment or failure (e.g., happiness, sadness)—broaden the scope of attention leaving people more resistant to misinformation. Implications for legal contexts, such as emotion-related errors in eyewitness testimony, are discussed. (shrink)

Law and emotion has evolved into a vibrant and diverse field, drawing in legal scholars and interdisciplinary partners from across the social sciences, hard sciences, and humanities. This introduction to the special section on law and emotion traces the history and theoretical underpinnings of this movement and situates the special section within it. The insights of emotion research can help legal scholars and practitioners to better calibrate law to human realities and to foster a desired set of emotional experiences among (...) law’s subjects. Law, in turn, offers to researchers a forum within which to explore emotion in a dynamic and influential real-world setting. The introduction ends with a call to disciplined interdisciplinarity. (shrink)