Can we experience genuine emotions in response to imagined situations?

It is important to define what we mean by imagined situations. In the course of this essay we will commonly refer to them as events contained within fiction but they can be found as an extention, or alternative to real life problems we face as well. Fiction can be, and has been used as a reference points for the majority of imagined situations in this essay. D. Maltravers often refers to works of fiction as …

…imagination. The crucial reason here is that they do not have direct acess to the outside world. We would say instead that emotions are sensitive to imagined or real events in the same fashion and that that sensitivity is determined by the degrees of congruence our current situation is compared to how we want the world to be. To illustrate how emotions can be sensitive to imagined situations Currie sights the case of Damasio's patients.