“ … Given the nature of emotional contagion, film is especially well suited to produce it. … Such scenes, which are typically shot in close-up and focus on a characters face, contain several eliciting conditions of emotional contagion. … The most serious challenge to identification accounts of character engagement, including those that emphasize the roles of empathy and simulation, has come from Noël Carroll, who has repeatedly charged that such accounts fail to explain the majority of our reactions to fictional film characters (Carroll 2007, 2008: 177-84). Carroll doesn’t deny that something akin to simulation, empathy, or identification can sometimes occur during the film viewing experiences, but he argues that when spectators‘ emotions match those of the characters, it is typically due to criterial prefocusing (which I’ll explain below), not a process of identification or simulation (2008: 149-91). Carroll offers several arguments to support his position. First, he says that spectators‘ emotions have different objects from those of the characters, and thus the emotions cannot be the same. This, he claims, is because we observe characters‘ situations from outside the narrative. Second, spectators often have different information or more information than the characters, and so they have a different experience of the narrative events. Finally, spectators often have different desires or preferences from those of the characters and ones that can be in conflict with those of the characters. If empathy, simulation, or some other form of identification were a major part of our interaction with characters, there would be greater symmetry than occurs between the characters‘ mental states and those of the spectators. …“

From: „“EMPATHY AND CHARACTER ENGAGEMENT“ (Amy Coplan) – THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION – TO PHILOSOPHY AND FILM“, Edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (First published 2009) | http://e-edu.nbu.bg/pluginfile.php/303072/mod_resource/content/0/9780415771665_-_Paisley_Livings_-_The_Routledge_Companion_to_Philosophy_and_Film_-_Routledge.pdf