Same or different? Recollection of or empathizing with an emotional event from the perspective of appraisal models

The same stimulus can evoke different emotions for different individuals. Incorporating personalized construal of stimuli is how appraisal models differ from dimensional models of emotion. Scherer formulated a model of the cognitive antecedents of emotions and analyzed recollections of events and emotions that his participants provided. In the present study, we were interested whether Scherer's appraisal model also applies to a situation in which participants have to empathize with a photo by building a story around the event depicted. Our results show that recollecting a personal emotional event and empathizing with a photo seem to be similar processes. Results of machine-learning techniques, however, show lacking performance of classifications to express discrete emotion labels in terms of appraisal data.