Everyone has watched another person yawn; whether it be sitting next to someone in class, in an interview, or just having a regular conversation with them, and all the sudden you’re yawning too. There is nothing wrong with yawning, nor does it bother me, I have always just wondered why people yawn one after another.

As I began my research for this blog post, I came across a website with a picture of a man yawning, and instantaneously I yawned, too. The phenomenon of yawning one after another is known as “Contagious Yawning”. “A new study from Duke University suggests that contagious yawning is not strongly related to variables like empathy, tiredness, or energy levels”. This means that you’re yawning due to seeing another person yawn, not because of a lack of sleep or any other widely known causes of a yawn.

In 2010 there was a study conducted at the University of Connecticut showing that young children (under the age of four) with autism or autism spectrum disorders were highly unlikely to acquire contagious yawning.

“In a test, 26 children with autism and 46 controls wore eye-tracking devices while watching video clips of people either yawning or remaining still. The researchers asked the children to count how many people in the clips were wearing glasses to make sure they looked at the people’s eyes. The video showed the person yawning only when the eye tracker verified that the children had fixed their gaze on the eyes.” In a regular group of people, almost everybody would yawn seeing the other people yawn, but in the group of autistic children only around 30% of them yawned. This study shows that they are not yawning not because they don’t empathize with others (which was a belief in the past), rather they can only fixate on one thing at a time, not allowing them to pay attention to someone else’s yawn.

In conclusion, contagious yawning has nothing to do with how energized you are; “It’s autonomic in the sense that it stems from the brainstem, way down in the basement level of the brain where certain responses are so inbuilt they don’t even qualify as reflexes”. We have determined the reason autistic people are not susceptible to it, and determined the preconceived notion that they are not able to it because they are unable to experience empathy, to be false

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