Is yawning really contagious?

At first it’s just a feeling that seems to be low back between the throat and ears. Then the mouth opens slightly and the lungs suck in air. The mouth widens more and more in length, the eyes close, and sometimes tears spurt in because the facial muscles press on the tear ducts.

Yawning to relax in everyday life

Yawning is actually a pretty unspectacular everyday thing. Especially when  tired  or bored, it comes involuntarily. That’s healthy: yawning stretches the jaw muscles and relaxes them again, the heartbeat speeds up and our brain gets better blood flow.

Social function in the animal kingdom

In the animal kingdom, yawning has a social function: it signals others and controls group behavior. If someone yawns, that means for everyone: go to sleep. Researchers suspect that yawning is sometimes contagious for this reason.

yawning as a reflex

Yawning is a reflex, that is, a repeating response to a particular stimulus. Scientists are still puzzling over what the stimulus is and why people yawn.

For a long time, yawning was undisputedly a reflex response to a lack of oxygen in the blood, for example when you are tired. Deep breathing actually improves blood flow to the brain, but American researchers recently discovered that yawning occurs even when the blood is very well oxygenated.

In people who breathed an air mixture with an increased concentration of carbon dioxide, the breathing rate increased, but they did not yawn more often. People who breathed pure oxygen also yawned as much as usual.

Contagious yawn

Also, yawning is contagious just by reading, hearing about, or thinking about it. Studies have shown that every second person can be infected. Some react in the first few seconds, others only after five minutes. This leads scientists to speculate that yawning has an interpersonal function.

Forschern zufolge werden nur verständnisvolle und mitfühlende Personen durch gähnende Mitmenschen zum Mitgähnen animiert. Steven Platek von der Drexel University in Philadelphia konnte in einer Studie mit Videoaufnahmen von gähnenden Menschen den Zusammenhang zwischen Persönlichkeitsstruktur eines Menschen und seiner Anfälligkeit sich durch Gähnen anstecken zu lassen nachweisen.

Möglicherweise entstehe durch das gemeinsame Gähnen unbewusst eine Möglichkeit, sich mit dem anderen zu identifizieren und auch zu verbünden, vermuten die Forscher. Seelisch kranke Menschen, die sich nicht in andere hineinversetzen können, zum Beispiel Schizophrene, werden dagegen von den Gefühlen anderer nicht berührt; sie lässt auch das Gähnen kalt.

Not only humans, but also chimpanzees can be infected by the yawning of a conspecific. This was discovered by a British-Japanese research team studying a group of six female chimpanzees. Until now, contagious yawning was thought to be a purely human phenomenon.