Have you ever wondered why every time you see someone yawning or you have a conversation about yawning you, yourself, yawn? This constantly happens to me which soon led me to become very curious whether or not yawning is truly “contagious” or just a matter of utter coincidence. With this being said I did some research and came across some very interesting studies on the topic.
Contagious yawning beings in the early stages of ones life. Some individuals are more vulnerable to contagious yawning; which can be driven more by time of day, empathy levels, and the amount of social bonding one goes through. A study at Duke University suggests that contagious yawning occurs “in response to hearing, seeing or thinking about yawning.” This study took a group of individuals who watched a three-minute video on other people yawning. It was then recorded, by the observers, how many times each of the participates yawned while watching the video. “Of the 328 people studied, 222 contagiously yawned at least once.” This yawning stems from the amount of communication skills each person has. It is due to the social bonding people go through that link them to connect with other individuals. These shared experiences and memories that people go through connect them on a different level causing them to be more receptive to others yawning.
Children with autism are less susceptible to contagious yawning. Autism disables people to pay attention to eye cues and reflexes that are a natural response to yawning. A study was published in Autism Research and Treatment with 26 children with autism and 46 without. They were all told to watch video clips of people yawning but were told to look for the people in the video wearing glasses(this was in order to try to get the eye cue response that normally happens to people when contagiously yawning). Overall only 30% of children with autism yawned in response to the videos; a rate that was equal to the amount of the people in the control group(which was double the amount). The part of the brain where quick responses and social behaviors are located, are not as apparent in children with the autism which disallows them to have the cognitive response of contagious yawning. Eye contact is not made as often by individuals with autism, impairing them from having “reciprocal gaze behaviour” with others. Reverse causation of this matter would be ruled out because contagious yawning does not lead to individuals getting autism, along with other outside third variable factors.
I had never known that there was a true scientific background on the concept of contagious yawning. My uncertainty was quickly answered when looking into these studies as well as learning that different mental illness can decrease ones ability to “catch” a contagious yawn. Try paying attention next time as your friends yawn and see who around them becomes prone to their yawns and so on.
