Empathy has been discussed here, obviously, but I wonder if there is a physical empathy. What I mean is being able to feel pain or other physical phenomena occurring for someone else as though your own. Can such a thing operate without any emotional empathy present? Is it neurologically different, or a setting or part of the presence of any kind of empathy available? Is it a matter of conditioning that empathic potential to differentiating empathy development? If so, does it then mean those of limited empathy also have a limited "supply" so physical sensation and encounters happen before the higher social awareness and thus stunt emotional dynamics?
I don't really go into aspects of emotional contagion, but those who are sensitive toward it I've seen outright try to control who they see and what is discussed for their own peace of mind.
To people like that, there's such a thing as "too much emotion". To me it's only "too much" if it makes them look like a crazy person or when it stops rational discussion.
On that note, is it true women that share a lot of time and space together find their menstrual cycles synchronizing? But is it a biological feedback, or a social response? Things could be both, but it would still indicate different empathy types, which development can indicate empathic capacity.
I thought that was more of a gradual pheromone copy response sort of thing (biological). If it could be social, someone could arguably through things like hypnosis control when their cycles are.
It makes me wonder if someone with a reduced capacity of scent might not sync up their cycles as readily.
I don't know if pheromone recognition requires the same mechanism as smell, per se. However, that does raise the question if emotion has such a method, as well. The mind-body feedback is hard to untangle. The main reason I ask is that it is infinitely easier for me to model and imagine physical pain or even consequences of other physical phenomena. My mind over-analyzes sequences of causality, and can anticipate pretty quickly, but I am confounded by emotional effects. I can understand, but only if I map it over my own point of view. The problem with that is that I simply find I do NOT care the same to apply an effective model.