Is Yawning Contagious? Research Paper

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Forces and Contagious Yawning

Is Yawning Contagious

Contagious yawning is believed to represent instinctive social sharing of physiological and emotional states, and could therefore a form of innate empathy (reviewed by Helt et al., 1620). In support of this hypothesis functional magnetic resonance imaging of human brains reacting to soundtracks of people yawning revealed enhanced brain activity in the right posterior inferior frontal gyrus, an area involved in empathy (Arnott, Singhal, and Goodale 335). Additional support comes from finding lower rates of contagious yawning in individuals suffering from mental disorders that are associated with impaired expressions of empathy, like schizophrenia (Haker and Rossler 352) and children with autism spectrum disorder (Helt et al. 1620).

Decades of social research has revealed that a person's attitude towards another determines how they interact with that person and are modifiable by situational forces (Zimbardo, Chapter 12), which suggests that empathic capacity may also be plastic and determined by situational cues. To provide further support for the existence of contagious yawning, this possibility was investigated by measuring the prevalence of contagious yawns in observers viewing videos of individuals reacting empathically or angrily to an episode of Dr. Phil.

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Materials and Methods

Study subjects (observers, N = 100) were randomly divided into two equal groups. Both groups watched videos of an individual (watcher; independent variable) reacting to an episode of Dr. Phil, but one group viewed the watcher reacting empathically to a guest on the show (empathic reaction), while the other group viewed the watcher reacting in a negative way (angry reaction). About ae of the way through the video the watcher yawns and observers were monitored for a response. Scores between the two conditions were compared using the student….....

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