When a person who has lived through a great number of hardships in life shows the appropriate amount of baseline empathy, but the empathetic expression is couched in a level of practicality, survival and utilitarianism.
Jean-Claude Van Damme did a great job at conveying post-apocalyptic empathy in the 1989 movie Cyborg. There are small moments where he conveys great emotional responses in only split second intervals because he's mostly having to continue kicking ass.