Abstract
The ability to share others' emotions, or empathy, is crucial for complex social interactions. Clinical, psychological, and neurobiological clues suggest a link between yawn contagion and empathy in humans (Homo sapiens). However, no behavioral evidence has been provided so far. We tested the effect of different variables (e.g., country of origin, sex, yawn characteristics) on yawn contagion by running mixed models applied to observational data collected over 1 year on adult (>16 years old) human subjects. Only social bonding predicted the occurrence, frequency, and latency of yawn contagion. As with other measures of empathy, the rate of contagion was greatest in response to kin, then friends, then acquaintances, and lastly strangers. Related individuals (r≥0.25) showed the greatest contagion, in terms of both occurrence of yawning and frequency of yawns. Strangers and acquaintances showed a longer delay in the yawn response (latency) compared to friends and kin. This outcome suggests that the neuronal activation magnitude related to yawn contagion can differ as a function of subject familiarity. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that yawn contagion is primarily driven by the emotional closeness between individuals and not by other variables, such as gender and nationality.
Highlights
Humans, the primates with the most complex social networks [1], rely on the ability to share others’ emotions to engage in successful social interactions [2]
Via a Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) we verified which variables affected the occurrence of yawn contagion
The only factor remaining in the best model (AICc = 2245.493) was the dyadic social bond (Table 1), which had a strongly significant effect on yawn contagion (F = 17.957, df1 = 3, df2 = 476, P,0.001)
Summary
The primates with the most complex social networks [1], rely on the ability to share others’ emotions to engage in successful social interactions [2]. This phenomenon, known as empathy, relies on a perception-action mechanism [3]. Posterior cingulate and precuneus activations when viewing someone yawning suggest that contagion involves empathy networks [23]. The negative covariance between amygdalar activation and subjective yawn susceptibility supports the relationship of yawn contagion and the face-processing-related emotional analyses during social interactions [24]. Mirror neurons are important for action understanding, a prerequisite for empathy [29]
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