Death.

If you're one of them, you'll be familiar with the feelings that are associated with the death of a loved one. Even if you've never felt it yourself, when someone tells you that their son or daughter, their closest firend maybe... has died, you know. You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voice, see it in their gait, feel thier emotions seeping from every pore of their body, I'm assuming, because I can. The difference is, I assume, that when you see things like this, you feel what they feel, where I simply feel uncomfortable.

Maybe uncomfortable isn't the exact word choice I was looking for. The thing is, faking it is pretty easy in situations you've been in a million times. Presented with a novel situation such as that, with no reference point to work from, all that I can do is go quiet and put on the same "sympathy" face that I would use when someone says that they had a bad day. How do you correctly adjust the magnitude of emotion to display?