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 prostate empathy.
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.
Oh man this is such an empathetic bowel movement. I love all women giving birth right now.
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 underground revolutionary 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.