"If you imagine a situation in which you are sad, angry, or afraid, the degree to which your face will display the emotion you feel depends in part on whether you imagine yourself to be solitary or surrounded by others (cf. Fridlund et al. 1990, Fridlund 1991). Contrary to what quarantining would seem to suggest, imagining or pretending that one is in the presence of others does—at least to some extent—cause one to behave as if one indeed were" (Gendler, Imaginative Contagion, 192).
Just as one sees the white afterimage of a black box without regard to whether one actually saw a black box or merely (perhaps we shouldn't use this word with respect to such a powerful cognitive feature) imagined it, one behaves differently in the real or imagined company of others.
Imagination, then, has cognitive1 and affective powers.
Perhaps it is not so cavalier then to recommend to the sad person that she imagine herself happy, or to the lonely person that she can imagine supportive company. If imagination can function as an (imperfect) substitute for real objects, then perhaps it can also function similarly with respect to affective states. I fear that this still comes across as short shrift to those struggling through negative affective states. Let me rephrase: I believe my imagined interlocutor would recognize that imagining her friends don't really like her would produce negative affective states: anxiety, depression, paranoia, &c.
So, if we accept that imagining certain negative things can exacerbate suffering, then surely imagination can be used in the opposite direction: to take us away from a grim reality with negative associated affect to a more positive, imagined world with positive associations.
In Samuel Kampa's "Imaginative Transportation," he describes palieving as "developmentally and conceptually posterior to at least some cognitive attitudes. . . one cannot palieve without being able to believe. . ." (12. Emphasis added).
What is the relationship between imagining p and knowing/remembering p?
Is it impossible for one to imagine that which he has no experience with?
I don't believe this is impossible.
My evidence: before I had experienced (romantic) love or (romantic) jealousy, I had read Their Eyes Were Watching God and Othello, which produced in my mind the feelings I had not yet experienced for myself, but would go on to. I notice here that both of these are affective imaginings. . . perhaps I could not imagine a new shade of blue. . . In any event, I'm uncertain.
Especially spatial-temporal cognition. See: the. Weiskrantz figural aftereffects experiment