Written By: Pavitra Sampath | Published : June 6, 2014 2:14 PM IST
Ever been in a boring meeting, extra long class or just been simply tired and sleepy? You must have noticed that when you yawn, a few others do too. Well, yawning is believed to be contagious. And this is not simply a myth. Here is exactly why.
Yawning is an action that is controlled by our hypothalamus. When we yawn our sinuses contract, lungs open up and we breathe in deeply. Although why we yawn is not yet known, it is believed that it is our body's way to cooling itself internally. But ever wondered why we yawn when others around us do? Well, studies show that it is probably a sign of empathy.
Empathy is basically an emotion where a person literally feels bad for you. In humans yawning is a sign of boredom or that the person is sleepy or tired. And a study conducted at the Leeds University, London, found that yawning is a form of empathy and social bonding. Their study found that people with more empathy (discovered by administering a psychological test) were twice as more likely to yawn when compared to those who were not as empathetic. So, when you see someone yawning your brain immediately feels the need to make them feel better and emulates that behavior this in turn leads to the feeling of social bonding . The research also performed brain scans on people who yawned, and found that the part of the brain that was stimulated (the precuneus and posterior temporal gyrus) dealt with empathy. Apart from that a study performed at the University of Conneticut found that emotional contagions like a yawn is what helps us humans bond.
To help strengthen this finding we dug a bit deeper and found that other studies also found that babies below the age of four and children with autism do not yawn when someone else does (a study conducted by Molly Helt at the University of Conneticut). They found that these groups had a hard time understanding empathy and had not developed the cognitive capabilities to empathise leading to the lack of contagious yawning.
So, did you yawn while reading this post? And how many people around you yawned too?
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