London - If you yawn and the person next to you follows suit, don’t worry – you are not boring them.
Rather, it is a good sign, for it means they really like you.
A scientific study suggests “contagious” yawns are a sign of deep empathy. They are caused by an irrepressible need to share and understand the emotions and feelings of others.
The “emotional bridge” created by the shared experience enhances social bonding, the Italian scientists say.
Researchers who monitored 33 adults over 380 hours, recording 1 375 yawns, found that a yawn was far more likely to spread – and did so more quickly – among friends and relatives. The scientists also tracked the way yawns spread among bonobos, the species of chimpanzee most closely related to humans.
They monitored the apes for 800 hours, and found that a yawn “wave” was just as likely to be triggered among bonobos as it is in humans. The impact of friendship, however, was not evident among the chimpanzees.
A yawn was just as likely to spread between unrelated primates as it was between family members. The researchers concluded that human ability to feel empathy is far stronger between friends and relatives.
They wrote in the journal PeerJ: “Humans’ responses were more frequent and faster when the trigger and responder shared a strong emotional bond. Humans show a different degree of sensitivity... but only when they are strongly emotionally involved.”
Biologists believe contagious yawns are caused by an involuntary copying of the facial expression seen in others. They think mirror neurons in the pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain involved in social behaviour – are triggered when certain expressions are seen in others, prompting us to copy them instinctively. The new research suggests that this “mirror system” is strongest between people who are emotionally attached, probably by shared memories.
The Italian scientists believe the difference between humans and bonobos is most profound when it comes to the strongest of our social bonds, particularly those shared with friends and family members.
When it comes to strangers, however, the results suggest we possess no more empathy than the apes do.
British scientists have previously found that babies and young children are immune to waves of contagious yawning. Research by psychologists at the University of Stirling, published in 2010, established that after the age of 11, children react to yawns in the same way as adults. - Daily Mail