Yawning is Contagious – Except in the Case of Kids
By: Keith
A lot of you have probably seen the Mythbusters episode where Jamie and Adam tested whether or not yawning is contagious. It turns out that yawning is indeed contagious – or, rather, catching (Adam and Jamie’s numbers don’t exactly match the research, but they’re pretty close). When someone else yawns what you’re doing by yawing in response is not a sign of fatigue. It’s a psychological, empathetic yawn. We do it subconsciously. Yawning is nothing more than a sign that we’re socially attuned to the people around us. I guess you could call it a survival mechanism. Imagine some angry cave man, who happens to be the leader of his small band of nomads, yawning at the camp fire. If none of the other cave men yawned too, he might take it as a sign of defiance. To keep from getting pummeled, our ancestors developed the wherewithal to mimic the people around them. Smart! So where do babies come into this?
Babies, it appears, don’t develop the yawning to a yawn response until after the age of 4. Psychologists at the University of Connecticut got funding to test baby yawns. While that might seem dumb the findings are pretty interesting. Out of 120 kids age 1 to 6, 10% of the kids younger than 4 yawned in response to his facilitator’s feigned yawn (the researcher would read a book to the kid and at random places would pretend to get tired and yawn). Among the older kids, 35-40% yawned contagiously. “That’s interesting” you say, “but what’s the point?” To be fair to the psychologists, this really was a legitimate study. Yawning was just one part of their larger goal of studying how and when humans develop social skills. Contagious yawning is a sign of healthy social development. In another test the psychologists performed the same experiment on autistic kids age 5-12. Only 11% yawned compared to 43% of non autistic kids.
Adam and Jamie test the yawning myth. I think another interesting study would be to study dogs. It appears, from the video, that Adam got a dog to contagiously yawn. That doesn’t surprise me considering dogs have evolved to be man’s companion.
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No lie… As I was reading your article and all four pictures of people yawning were on my computer screen…… I yawned. Weird huh?
I remember watching that episode of Mythbusters. I yawned so much in that hour that I was in tears by the time it was over. I had no idea young children didn’t experience it. Thanks for the info.