ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that individual differences in minds often present significant difficulties for attempts to explain or to predict another person's emotional experiences and responses, either through empathizing with that other person or through using imagination to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. Character or personality includes moral traits, emotional traits, what it will call adverbial traits, and strength and weakness of will. As an aspect of characterization, there are those facts about the person which are not yet settled enough to be aspects of personality, but which nevertheless can affect one's emotional responses. The chapter argues that, working in tandem with this body of information, there remains an important place for perceptual imagination—perceptual imagination without imaginative identification. It describes the imaginative identification where the emotions are concerned relates to the way people can sometimes surprise us, and themselves, by acting 'out of character'.
