The article examines emotion, crime and anti-social behavior in an inner-city community.
Research into emotion, crime and anti-social behaviour has lacked psychological input and rarely considered the multi-directional associations between emotion, crime and morality. The authors present a study analysing audio recordings of two community groups meeting in a deprived inner-city area with high rates of crime, using conversation analytic and discursive psychological techniques to conduct an affective - textual analysis that draws out aspects of participants - moral reasoning and identifies its emotional dimensions. Moral reasoning around crime and anti-social behaviour took three forms (invoking moral categories, developing moral hierarchies, invoking vulnerable others) and was bound up with a wide range of emotional enactments and emotion displays. Findings are discussed in relation to contemporary government policy and possible future research. References and appendix (Published Abstract)