Forensic examination of affect: from theory to practice

Abstract

The article analyzes the problems of expert assessment of the emotional state of persons who have committed offenses, including multiple murders, in order to establish the presence or absence of affect in them. The criteria of the forensic psychological examination of legally significant affect, the features of its diagnosis and methodological approaches to the definition are considered. The subspecies of affect and the specifics of their qualifications are considered. There is a discrepancy between the psychological concept of affect and the legal concept of a sudden strong emotional disturbance; unjustified exaggeration by the legislator of the importance of circumstances provoking affect, when qualifying affective actions under privileged articles of the Criminal Code (107, 113), while not paying due attention to the analysis of the characteristics of the behavior of the accused at the time of the crime, before and after aggressive actions, and also not taking into account the subjective factor in the perception of the conflict situation, the personality of the accused, the presence of "pathological soil" and others. At the same time, in persons with mental abnormalities (within the framework of sanity), one can observe a weighted picture of affect with signs of deep affective narrowing of consciousness, when at the height of an affective explosion, affective aggression radiates to others, who often happen to be accidentally involved in a traumatic situation or have a distant relationship to it (the so-called widespread or radiating affect-torts)

References

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