Yawning Detection Sensitivity and Yawning Contagion.

Chia-Huei Tseng,Meingold H. M. Chan

doi:10.1177/2041669517726797

Abstract

Contagious yawning—the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning—is a well-documented phenomenon in humans and animals. The reduced yawn contagion observed in the autistic population suggested that it might be empathy related; however, it is unknown whether such a connection applies to nonclinical populations. We examined influences from both empathy (i.e., autistic traits) and nonempathy factors (i.e., individuals’ perceptual detection sensitivity to yawning, happy, and angry faces) on 41 nonclinical adults. We induced contagious yawning with a 5-minute video and 20 yawning photo stimuli. In addition, we measured participants’ autistic traits (with the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire), eye gaze patterns, and their perceptual thresholds to detect yawning and emotion in human face photos. We found two factors associated with yawning contagion: (a) those more sensitive to detect yawning, but not other emotional expressions, displayed more contagious yawning than those less sensitive to yawning expressions, and (b) female participants exhibited significantly more contagious yawning than male participants. We did not find an association between autistic trait and contagious yawning. Our study offers a working hypothesis for future studies, in that perceptual encoding of yawning interacts with susceptibility to contagious yawning.

Highlights

Contagious yawning, the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning (Baenninger, 1987), is a well-documented phenomenon observed in human beings, primates (Anderson, Myowa-Yamakoshi, & Matsuzawa, 2004), and dogs (Harr, Gilbert, & Phillips, 2009)
They found that individuals with higher susceptibility to contagious yawning are better at recognizing their own faces and theory of mind tasks that capture one’s social understanding
Since our count data of contagious yawning are highly skewed and contained an excessive count of zeros (55%), we examined the association between contagious yawning and other variables using a Poisson regression (Hoogenhout et al, 2013), which is well suited for this kind of count data

Summary

Introduction

Contagious yawning, the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning (Baenninger, 1987), is a well-documented phenomenon observed in human beings, primates (Anderson, Myowa-Yamakoshi, & Matsuzawa, 2004), and dogs (Harr, Gilbert, & Phillips, 2009). An expanding range of hypotheses have been proposed, including an innate releasing mechanism (Provine, 1986, 1989), respiratory or circulatory, thermoregulation, the arousal hypothesis, and the social communication view (for a review, see Guggisberg, Mathis, Schnider, & Hess, 2010). Platek, Critton, Myers, and Gallup (2003) found that contagious yawning could be understood as a social behavior that involves mental attribution (i.e., the propensity to understand another’s mental state). They found that individuals with higher susceptibility to contagious yawning are better at recognizing their own faces (i.e., selfface recognition) and theory of mind tasks that capture one’s social understanding

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