Everytime I see or hear someone yawn, I feel the urge to yawn and sometimes I do end up yawning. Even just reading the word yawn multiple times makes me want to yawn. Just typing this makes me want to yawn.
Contagious yawning happens even when we are not tired according to an experiment done on 120 healthy kids from ages 1 to 12. The children were not aware that their yawns were being watched and as a person read a book to them, the person would yawn and then each kid who yawned would be counted as a contagious yawn. The study found that contagious yawning is not apparent amongst kids ages 1 through 3, but there was a hike in contagious yawning in kids starting at age 4 and up. This is a peculiar finding. The study mentioned before also did another part where they tested contagious yawning on 26 kids from ages 6 to 15 who had autism which ranged on different parts of the spectrum. Since there were less kids in this study, they were not able to make a conclusion based on age, but the study did find that kids with mild autism yawned 1/2 the amount the healthy kids did, and the kids with more severe autism did not yawn at all. The study found a correlation between contagious yawning and empathy. This makes sense because the Theory of Mind does not develop in healthy kids until about age 4. Which means kids younger than 4 do not understand that others have different thoughts than their own and therefore can not empathize another’s yawn with their own. This also makes sense because children with autism also struggle with the development of the Theory of Mind. However the study did not take into account a confounding variable that maybe the kids were yawning because they were tired or anxious. So this study could possibly suffer from the Texas Sharpshooter Problem and be a false positive.
Another study was conducted using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). An fMRI shows brain activity vs a regular MRI which only just gives images of the structure of the brain. This experiment was also done a small group of people (18, 9 m, 9 f), but it used healthy adults ages 18-48 years old. The subjects did not specifically know that their yawns were being monitored, but they did know they were participating in an experiment on facial expressions. The subjects were shown pictures of people with different facial expressions. When they were shown a picture of a person that was yawning and then felt the urge to yawn or actually yawned, it was counted as a contagious yawn. The study found that the part of the brain used for empathy is the same part activated when the subjects saw another person yawning and felt the urge to, or actually yawn. They connected the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the urge to yawn. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex had been previously connected to “empathetic processing.” This study coincides with the findings of the other study. Also, the same as the other study did not take into account confounding variables like that maybe the subjects were just getting tired of looking at pictures and just yawned out of boredom. Also the brain has different parts that do many different functions, so maybe yawning is a function that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex does completely separate of empathy. I think this study is conducted about as well as possible considering we can not control people’s other reasons for yawning.
Collectively we are not able to exactly pinpoint what causes contagious yawning. Maybe if the first study was repeated with the exact same layout except another set of kids. If they used 240 kids, but still separated each kid by age having 20 kids per age group. Then each age group would be broken up into 2 sets of 10. This way if maybe the kids in one room are just actually bored by the reader maybe the other set of kids will give us truer results. It would be best to have as many sets of kids as possible obviously. There does seem to be a correlation between empathetic thinking and contagious yawning, but the studies are not strong enough yet to know for sure.
Honestly just reading those first couple of lines about yawning made me yawn. What I found to be interesting was that “kids with mild autism yawned 1/2 the ammount the healthy kids did, and the kids with more severe autism did not yawn at all”. I like how you included the part about the Theory of Mind because it helps explain why kid with autism yawned less or did not yawn at all. As I was reading this the question of “Why do we yawn?” came up in my head so, I decided to look into it more. This link actually says that scientests have yet to find an answer to this question but it mentions different studies to why we yawn.
I’ve always seen a contagion that yawning offers, but I never really understood why or how this was possible. I find it very intriguing and likely that empathy is a factor that contributes to it. I support that study with the autistic children, but to make it more accurate, they should have had an even number of non-autistic and autistic children. Maybe they could even combine them in a classroom together and see if that has any impact on the yawns. I’m a bit confused with your idea with splitting the 20 kids into 2 groups of 2. I don’t see anything wrong with it, I’m just confused on what it would change or why it matters. The subject of yawning is very interesting to me, so I am now considering doing a blog on what yawning is exactly. Thanks for sharing!
I found this article to be very engaging and I must admit that it made me want to yawn. But I think you do have a point about yawning being contagious because I see it happening all the time. But what exactly in our brain is telling us to yawn when someone else yawns? I wish you would have gone into a little more detail about that. I know you said something about empathy, but I don’t think that is the sole reason for the yawntagious craze. The confounding variables of the studies could be amount of sleep and maybe level of interest because each age group tested has a different level of attention and sleep patterns.
Hi Daniel,
I yawned about four times while reading your post. Once because of the picture of the baby yawning, twice from reading the word yawn, and once from thinking about yawning. It’s such a weird concept, but contagious yawning is definitely a thing that happens. While in class the other day, I yawned because I was tired, and I noticed that I caused a string of other students who saw me to yawn, which continued to spread across the room. Interesting stuff! I read that if you make direct eye contact with someone while you yawn, they are more likely to yawn than just seeing you yawn. I also read that this can happen with dogs also, but 1. you have to make direct eye contact with the dog while you yawn, and 2. it has to be a real yawn because they can sense when it is a fake yawn. Great post!
-Claire