Being half way through my first semester in college one could definitely say I’m sleep deprived. I’ll be the first to admit that I have yet to improve time management skills nor balance completing my never ending tasks in an efficient manner. However, I know I’m not the only one dealing with a tired, sluggish attitude all day due to a lack of sleep. In almost all of my dreaded morning my classes I’ll catch someone obnoxiously yawning, which will immediately cause me to yawn. Growing up I was always told that yawning is contagious. To me, this has never made complete sense, but i decided to do some research.

How could simply yawning, something I’ve always been told is a sign of one’s tiredness, cause someone else to have to yawn? In fact, accruing to sciene.HowStuffWorks.com, you don’t even have to specifically see a person yawn to feel the urge to, even reading about it or hearing about it will cause it to happen. To be honest, as I’m sitting here writing about yawning I can barely help myself from getting the urge. According to this article, based on studies contagious yawning may be due to our empathy for others. Whether we notice it or not, we could be connecting with someone else’s emotional state; therefore, how tempted you are to yawn after seeing someone else yawn is a depiction of how much empathy you feel. A study was conducted by researchers to test this theory. The researchers selected 40 psychology students and 40 engineering students, and each of them was placed individually in a waiting room with an undercover assistant who yawned ten times in a period of however minutes. The results showed that psychology students, who are being trained to pay attention to others’ emotions, yawned an average of 5.5 times in the waiting room, and the engineering students yawned an average of about 1.5 times.