Testing the model of judicial stress using a COVID-era survey of U.S. federal court personnel.

Non-judicial court personnel, critical to a well-functioning justice system, experience overloaded dockets and the responsibility of making significant decisions, contributing to cognitive stress. Understanding and mitigating their stress is essential for maintaining judicial efficiency. We adapted Miller and Richardson's Model of Judicial Stress to assess stress in a broad sample of non-judicial court personnel (n = 122), including judges, lawyers, and administrative staff. Participants responded to surveys about their stress levels, job performance, and health; they also completed cognitive performance tasks. The findings indicated that stress negatively affected employee outcomes including cognitive performance, job performance, job satisfaction, and health outcomes. Notably, perceived job performance had declined compared to the previous year, suggesting that the pandemic was an additional significant stressor. Based on the data, the Model of Judicial Stress is also applicable to other types of courtroom personnel, underlining its relevance across various judicial roles.

Judges' emotion: an application of the emotion regulation process model.

Courtrooms are often emotionally charged atmospheres where parties have a vested interest in the proceedings and their outcomes. Judges are exposed to a wide range of emotions and stressors in the course of their work. Though the ideal of a dispassionate judge persists, more empirical work is needed to identify how judges regulate their own emotional experience in court. Using Maroney and Gross typology of emotion regulation strategies, this study explored the self-reported use and preference of these strategies among a sample of U.S. judges. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we found that judges reported using a variety of intrinsic (self-directed) and extrinsic (directed toward others) emotion regulation strategies, though judges reported using some strategies such as suppression more frequently than others. We also found that many of the strategies judges described matched a subset of the strategies described by Maroney and Gross supporting their typology.