A study on contagious yawning by the Duke University Medical
Center has found that it may not be linked to empathy and tiredness. In
fact, contagious yawning may decrease as one ages.
"The lack of association in our study between contagious yawning and
empathy suggests that contagious yawning is not simply a product of
one's capacity for empathy," said study author Elizabeth Cirulli,
Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Center for Human Genome
Variation at Duke University School of Medicine.
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Science Recorder
reported that "contagious yawning takes place in humans and chimpanzees
in response to hearing, observing or thinking about yawning. As
opposed to spontaneous yawning which is first seen in the womb,
contagious yawning does not start until early childhood."
Those afflicted with autism or schizophrenia display less contagious
yawning, even though they still show spontaneous yawning. The
researchers feel that if they can understand contagious yawning more
thoroughly, they might be able to understand these two diseases better,
and therefore develop better treatments.
The experiment, which was performed on 328 healthy individuals,
consisted of showing a three minute video of people yawning to the
volunteers and recording how many times they each yawned. The amounts
ranged from 0 to 15, according to Austrian Tribune. Of the 328 volunteers, 222 contagiously yawned.
Science Recorder also reported that the "researchers did not
discover a strong relationship between contagious yawning and empathy,
intelligence or time of day." As age increased, however, volunteers were
less likely to yawn. Age accounted for an eight percent variability in
the contagious yawn response.
"Age was the most important predictor of contagious yawning, and even
age was not that important. The vast majority of variation in the
contagious yawning response was just not explained," Cirulli stated.
The study has been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
