Contagious Yawning Is Very Interesting Behavior
Feb 1, 2009 by Mike
According to just released research by the 'University of Leeds', contagious yawning may reveal empathy and not just tiredness or boredom and the more susceptible the person is to the contagion the more likely he is to be empathetic to the initiating yawner.
Although many species yawn it is only some humans and possibly their closest animal relatives that find yawning infectious which suggests that the reason is psychological.
"Contagious yawning is a very interesting behavior", said Dr Catriona Morrison who is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Leeds and is leading the work. "You don't need a visual cue, you don't even need an auditory cue, you can just read about it or think about it and it gets you going. We believe that contagious yawning indicates empathy. It indicates an appreciation of other people's behavioral and physiological state".
The 'University of Leeds' team carried out an experiment on two groups of students, psychology students and engineering students in order to test the concept.
Each student had to wait in a room with another person that was actually a researcher, and who yawned ten times in ten minutes and the scientists recorded how often the students yawned in response.
Each participant was then asked to take a test designed to show their levels of empathy. They analyzed pictures of eyes and recorded the emotions they felt and the results showed that the students who had succumbed most to the contagious yawning were also the most empathetic.
The psychology students were far more susceptible to contagious yawning and scored significantly higher on the empathy test than did the engineering students.
Catriona Morrison said, "We thought that psychology students would be highly empathetic and that engineering students would be more systemized and more interested in numbers and formulas and the results of the experiment appear to back this up", she added.
My personal reaction to this is that I see no reason why psychology students would be more empathetic than engineering students and think it possible that psychology students are more frequently bored by their classes and are therefore more practiced in yawning than engineering students.
It is of course well known that research reflects to some degree the desired outcome of the researchers which in this case was that psychology students would be shown to be more empathetic than others.