One's prostate gland reacting to someone's descriptions of painful experiences, or a reaction to the sight of someone elses painful experience. This is a dull, almost tingly sensation that lasts a few seconds and then disappears into the ether. Depending on the duration and magnitude of the sensation, this could be the equivalent of your prostate crying uncontrollably, or just emitting a concerned sigh.
My wife told me about her mom's varicose vein surgury, and I almost doubled-over from prostateempathy.
An empathetic bowel movement is when a person, usually a male, has an extremely tough bowel movement, leading to extreme empathy and sympathy towards women who are active in the birthing process.
What is the function of utterances of this kind? ... their function is a learning function ... in the sense that they contribute to the child's learning about the environment.
... so we can interpret this mathetic function as arising from a combination of two other functions, the personal and the heuristic. (Halliday, M.A.K. (2003). The language of Early Childhood. London: Continuum. p. 80)
using broadcasts sports/news/entertainment/business, etc,for the attachment of your micro social meme to send to others by non verbal facial expressions of knowing/understanding/empathy .
We knew there was undergroundrevolutionary activity going on Tehran that was mostly whispered about by teenage girls but you could tell the newscasters IE, Stewart/Colbert/Maddow all knew something was going on in a empathetic relay/semiotic subtext.