During college, I had a friend who claimed that I yawn too much and always correlated it to lack of sleep and being drowsy because I was tired. Moreover, he always managed to blame me for making him yawn, as well as making him drowsier during lectures. He then continued to record the number of yawns during a lecture and the number of times it made him yawn. What started out as a joke became a very serious physiology project and the findings may just change your thoughts on yawning. The negative connotations that are associated with yawning are clear, people think you’re tired, drowsy, lazy, or uninterested. Various studies have indicated an increase in arousal level after yawning as reflected by a significant change in the various physiological variables (Gupta & Mittal, 2013). One variable that’s indicative of arousal was the significant increase in heart rate that followed after a yawn. The other variable was an increase in skin conductance. What modeled increase of skin conductance as arousal? Well, it turns out that coffee increases skin conductance and since caffeine stimulates the nervous system, yawning might have an effect like coffee (Gupta & Mittal, 2013). Yawning also cools the brain because core brain temperature was almost 1°C higher before a yawn took place (Gupta & Mittal, 2013). Clinical research also shows patients who suffer from stress, epilepsy, anxiety, and head trauma yawn more frequently than those who did not experience any damage to their brain. All these variables prove that yawing stimulates the human body, but why is a yawn so contagious?
Humans are very social, and we tend to express facial mimicry through a variety of actions. Moreover, scientists have found that there is a positive link between empathy and the susceptibility to contagious yawning (Franzen, Mader, & Winter, 2018). Empathy is merely a feeling; how can it be measured? Scientists utilized the Interpersonal Reactivity Index which is a published multi-dimensional tool to measure empathy. Subjects who yawned in response to observing others yawn exhibited higher empathy values by half a standard deviation (Franzen, Mader, & Winter, 2018). Therefore, this leads to the idea that a person is empathetic if they specifically yawn after watching another person yawn, not when they yawn by themselves. Do you think that empathy could really be measured through an index?
Franzen A, Mader S, Winter F. Contagious yawning, empathy, and their relation to prosocial behavior. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Dec;147(12):1950-1958. doi: 10.1037/xge0000422. Epub 2018 May 17. PMID: 29771564.
Gupta, S., & Mittal, S. (2013). Yawning and its physiological significance. International journal of applied & basic medical research, 3(1), 11–15. https://doi.org/10.4103/2229-516X.112230
Great post! I found it super interesting and I had always wondered the same thing about why yawning is so contagious. My basketball coach gets mad at us when we yawn because, socially, like you said makes you seem tired or uninterested. However, I found in an article that yawning can also be a way to bring in more oxygen if you are taking short little breaths(KidsHealth). This makes sense because when exercising you begin to take shorter breaths when you aren't thinking about or controlling your breathing, so it's another way our body forces us to slow down and bring air in!
ReplyDeleteWhy Do I Yawn? (for Kids) - Nemours KidsHealth. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://kidshealth.org/en/kids/yawn.html#:~:text=One is that when we,dioxide out of the blood.
Hi Youn! I thought your blog was super interesting and informative. I always wondered why yawns were so "contagious". I never though empathy was associated with the susceptibility of yawning. After researching more about yawning, I found that individuals tend to yawn more around friends and family than around strangers. I wonder if it's because we are more comfortable with our actions around others we are familiar with than with strangers. What I also found is how dogs also get contagious yawning!
ReplyDeleteNorscia, I., Zanoli, A., Gamba, M., & Palagi, E. (2020). Auditory Contagious Yawning Is Highest Between Friends and Family Members: Support to the Emotional Bias Hypothesis. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00442