Gaping gap

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This article was published 07/02/2016 (3713 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Italian scientists who documented humans interacting in everyday situations have found women are more susceptible to catching the urge to yawn from others than men.

The findings, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, may shed light on this social contagion and on the differences in empathetic capacity between women and men.

A yawn, which lasts six seconds on average, is an involuntary action characterized by opening the mouth, breathing in, expanding a tube that leads to the eardrums and then exhaling. It may be one of the best-known social contagions: watch a friend yawn, and you might soon find yourself doing the same, even if you weren’t sleepy.

“Yawning is contagious in that it can be triggered by others’ yawns,’ the study’s authors wrote.

“A wide range of sensory modes are vectors of contagious yawning in humans, ranging from hearing, seeing, reading about or even thinking about yawning.’

There’s been building evidence a yawn’s ability to spread to others is somehow correlated with the ability to empathize and pick up on others’ emotional states and imagine what they may be thinking or feeling.

Contagious yawning seems to increase starting around the age of four or five years old, about the same time children start developing the ability to identify other people’s emotions, and it falls when those empathetic abilities also fall in old age. It’s also more common between friends and family with whom you share a close personal bond than between two strangers.

“There is growing evidence that yawn contagion is an empathy-based phenomenon,’ the authors wrote. “Contagious yawning recruits different neuronal networks involved in empathic processing, including the inferior frontal gyrus and other mirror neuron areas.’

Humans aren’t the only ones who are susceptible. The contagiousness of yawning has been documented in chimpanzees, bonobos, dogs, wolves and other animals. It can even spread between species. Scientists have found chimpanzees and dogs both find human yawns contagious.

If contagious yawning has a link with empathy, is there a difference in susceptibility between men and women? After all, research has suggested women demonstrate a greater capacity for empathy than men do.

“If women are more empathic than men, then we also expect that in the susceptible population, women are infected at higher rates by others’ yawns compared with men,’ the authors wrote.

To find out, scientists from the University of Pisa in Italy observed human subjects in their “natural environment’ at the office, eating dinner and at various social events. Over a period of nearly five years (Oct. 26, 2010 to April 27, 2015), they recorded 1,461 bouts of yawning. They restricted their analysis to 92 pairs of people (one trigger and one responder) who experienced at least three separate instances of yawn contagion.

‘There is growing evidence that yawn contagion is an empathy-based phenomenon’

The researchers found there was no difference in the rate of spontaneous yawning without a social trigger between men and women. But women responded much more frequently to another person’s yawn than men did. Also, people were more likely to yawn in response to friends’ yawns than they were to those of acquaintances and even more likely to respond to the yawns of regular partners or family members.

“Empathy enhances parental care, interindividual communication and group living, by motivating prosocial behaviours and favouring the development of moral reasoning,’ the authors wrote.

The same capacity that gives women their comparatively better ability to empathize, also evident in their susceptibility to social yawning, could have broader social applications, the authors wrote.

“The ability to preconsciously decode and replicate the emotions of others, e.g. via yawn contagion and facial mimicry, may allow women to respond with more appropriate behaviours toward others and to be more successful in forming enduring alliances,’ the authors wrote.

— Los Angeles Times