• Question: why is yawning so contagious?

    Asked by charlie13 to David, Luna, Probash on 25 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Probash Chowdhury

      Probash Chowdhury answered on 24 Mar 2011:

      Often, if one person yawns, this may cause another person to “sympathetically” yawn. Observing another person’s yawning face (especially his/her eyes), even reading, or thinking about yawning, or looking at a yawning picture can cause a person to yawn. The cause for contagious yawning may lie with mirror neurons, i.e., neurons in the frontal cortex of certain vertebrates, which upon being exposed to a stimulus, activates the same regions in the brain. Mirror neurons have been proposed as a driving force for imitation which lies at the root of much human learning, e.g., language acquisition. Yawning may be an offshoot of the same imitative impulse.

      A 2007 study found that young children with autism spectrum disorders do not increase their yawning frequency after seeing videos of other people yawning, in contrast to non-autistic children. In fact, the autistic children actually yawned less during the videos of yawning than during the control videos. This supports the claim that contagious yawning is related to empathic capacity (being able to empathise and copy).

    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 25 Mar 2011:

      Yawning is an involuntary reflex, which is probably designed to keep us awake. Many animals yawn, and many other animals also show the same ‘contagious’ effect. So the fact that it is contagious must be some sort of response that is triggered within social groups – perhaps in the same sort of way as other warning signs can be quickly passed through a group.

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