Creatures’ brains relax and refresh after yawning, and they will better to continue work. However, have you ever notice that you start to yawn after the person next to you yawned even if you don’t feel tired? Or after you yawn, the person next to you start to yawn. Is yawning contagious? Do the sandmen fly to one person to let them yawn and then fly to another one? The answer is no, sandmen are not real.
A yawning cat — Credit to the Author
Instead, contagious yawning is natural, even animals have contagious yawning. One research team conducted an experiment which volunteers were asked to yawn after watching a yawning video. The research indicated that the brain’s primary motor cortex automatically triggers the relax. This reaction can cause creatures to yawn.
The other word to explain this behavior is empathy. Empathy can be defined as the ability to sense others’ emotion or feeling. One person can understand and feel another’s emotion when he/she yawns. Afterward, that person who sensed another’s emotion starts to imitate him/she to feel his/her feeling. Yawning has the same function, this is why when you observe a person yawn, you will start to yawn.
Contagious around different animals — image from baillement.com
However, contagious yawning does not always happen. A science writer Sam Kean indicated that human can pick up contagious yawning after the age of 4 to 5, whereas the small kids cannot have that behavior. Also, the chance of having someone yawn back might higher if you yawn in front of your family or relatives.
Another research shows contagious yawning might exist in brain substrates that related to self-recognition and mental state. These brain substrates control contagious yawning. In that research, the researchers observed subjects’ behavior while they watch videos about yawning and find out that most of the normal volunteers started to yawn involuntary. However, most of the schizophrenic volunteers did not. Therefore, schizophrenic patients who lack recognition ability and the mental state attribution to others show little or no contagious yawning.
Although some of the research can figure out the reason for contagious yawning, it remains an unexplained mystery. Contagious yawning may also relative to temperature and further research should be done to solve the problem.
–Catherine Wu
