Wow! This is very similar to what happens to me.
I actually spent a lot of my life completely unaware that other people's emotions could resonate in me like a tuning fork. I would feel the emotions, and accept them as my own, which can lead to confusion and other problems. Expressing someone else's emotion around them seems to create an emotional feedback loop.
For instance, if someone is harboring a lot of anger, even if they put on a happy face, being around them creates the same uneasiness they are feeling within myself. Not knowing that it is their anger, I react with anger when they say something to me or something happens, and it sets them off.
I became aware of psychic pollution after reading Eckhart Tolle's discourse on the "painbody" phenomena in The Power of Now. Ever since then, I have been able to observe way I feel without the attachment or the sense of self invested in it. I can sense when an energetic disturbance occurs within me before it manifests as an emotional reaction, and I can sense when those around me are fishing for an emotional reaction from me.
Anyway, a counterpart to being able to sense what those around me feel is being able to feel the emotional history of specific objects or places. Most objects and places are fairly neutral. It's kind of like how certain places have a distinct smell, but most places differ in smell only subtly.
The best example I can think of is I simply can't go to a cemetery, especially if it has fresh graves, or has a lot of graves. I am nearly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of sadness or hopelessness, which I feel is residual emotions associated with the graves by the families that erected them. I don't personally feel that death is a sad or depressing thing at all, and even when people close to me have died, I don't feel the same feeling as when I visit a cemetery.
I had the same feeling overwhelm me when I visited the AIDS Quilt. It really confused me, because I didn't realize I was visiting the AIDS Quilt -- it was just on display somewhere I happened to be. I began feeling really, really bad for no apparent reason, and then I find out that we are approaching the quilt. Once I actually got up to it, I could only look at a few of the panels. The sadness is so overwhelming that I was choking back tears and had to get out of the area. Once I left the vicinity I was normal again in less than a minute.
I even get a sense of emotion from certain websites within the first few microseconds of visiting them, before my conscious mind has an opportunity to read any of the content, or even register what color the background and text is. For instance, Erin's website gives me a palpable burst of calmness and serenity every time I visit.
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