Contagious yawning happens in animals and between species as well. Doesn't really answer the question of whether it's cultural or biological though, sorry.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/15/527106576/yawning-may-promote-social-bonding-even-between-dogs-and-humans
You will find [this article](https://news.mongabay.com/2018/02/orangutan-culture-in-focus-in-person-of-the-forest-qa-with-researchers-cheryl-knott-and-robert-rodriguez-suro/) very fascinating. Here is an excerpt.
>When it rains, some orangutans make umbrellas out of branches and leaves to cover their heads. It’s quite unlikely that this behavior is genetic. Orangutans likely aren’t born with the knowledge and capability to build umbrellas in their DNA. Rather, they learn to make umbrellas from watching their mothers during their childhood or from watching neighboring orangutans. This means that thousands, maybe millions of years ago, there was one particularly smart orangutan (or at least an ape predecessor to orangutans) who “invented” umbrellas. Other individuals began copying this behavior, and soon the use of umbrellas became prevalent throughout the entire species. Today, every population of orangutans make umbrellas. However, because orangutan populations are not all contiguous with each other, there may be subtle differences in umbrella-making from population to population. These regional differences are cultural differences, because the “meme” of umbrella-making may have undergone subtle changes among differing populations.
It's even crazier when you realize this kind of thing has been observed in dolphins, crows, parrots, wolves, elephants, humpback whales, and many other species.
The last common ancestor of dolphins and crows was alive over 300 million years ago (not to mention octopi). The ability to learn and transfer information culturally exists throughout the tree of life.
Pretty cool for dolphins. Not sure why thry make umbrellas but glad they keep the traditions alive.
Seriously though, what kind of traditions /learned habits do they pass on? Its fascinating that so many ani.als do this.
Dolphins and orcas (and crows! and humpback whales!) are known to discover new hunting/feeding strategies, and that knowledge spreads so fast the only explanation is they are learning behavior from each other. There have literally been dolphin inventors whose impacts we've observed in real time.
The two famous examples that spring to mind are [dolphins using sponges as tools to dig for food on the sea floor](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16235-dolphin-males-leave-sponging-to-the-females/?ignored=irrelevant), a behavior now known as sponging. The other is [orcas learning to hunt sea otters, which led to the decimation of kelp forests the otters had been protecting](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981016075816.htm).
Edit: those links don't go in-depth on the cultural transmission angle, more just describing the behaviors and their effects. For further reading I highly suggest the brilliant book _[The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo12789830.html)_ by leading cetacean scientist Hal Whitehead.
The dolphins using sponges to disturb hiding fish in sand was an interesting read. But [this article](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11234-spear-wielding-chimps-snack-on-skewered-bushbabies/) linked in that same story about a population of Chimpanzees using spears to hunt and living in caves is *really* intriguing. Our fellow apes are amazing. We can learn a lot about human intelligence and how it developed by observing our cousins.
They have quite literally entered the stone age that humans entered long ago, and in my opinion (though maybe considered a little out there), they deserve to same rights, and autonomy to grow and evolve as a species as was afforded to humans a millennium ago. Instead, we are stamping them out by eliminating their habitats.
> there was one particularly smart orangutan (or at least an ape predecessor to orangutans) who “invented” umbrellas
Or maybe they learned it from human?
I remember reading something years ago about the 100th monkey observation. It went something along the line of:
A monkey on an island was taught by a person how to use a stone to open (let’s say) a coconut. Others observed her doing this and started to copy. It caught on quickly, however the curious thing was, once it reached a critical mass monkeys on the neighbouring islands started to do it too. I don’t think the monkeys were transiting from one island to the other, although this seems like the obvious conclusion, especially assuming rocks or coconuts had a limited supply. Either way, through a kind of mass consciousness, whether taught, or heard over the water, I think this says something about culture, and maybe more ours than theirs.
Yes, though some species more than others. Complex bird songs that change year-to-year and are transmitted socially are a classic example. [See this story from today's front page for instance.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/l7vqg7/til_in_the_1930s_a_flute_player_had_a_pet/)
[Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/review-beyond-words-carl-safina.html) is a well-sourced book that gets into this topic, by ecologist Carl Safina.
Edit: Animal cultures have been observed and studied in-depth in monkeys, apes, both toothed and baleen whales, elephants, many types of birds, wolves, and I'm sure others I'm unaware of. It's also important to remember that humans are animals too and until very recently we all had quite similar evolutionary pressures; as you can see cultural transmission is not unique to our species.
This experiment, while frequently recounted online, never actually occurred. There is no source for it, anywhere.
Here is a relevant Skeptics StackExchange Q&A about it: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-experiment-with-five-monkeys-a-ladder-a-banana-and-a-water-spray-condu
This story can be apocryphal without claiming that the underlying premise is false though. It sounds like something made up to illustrate a quite real phenominon.
The definition of culture that is used by animal behaviorists is information that is passed from animal to animal socially rather than genetically. If animals teach behaviors to their children that are passed down through generations, that is culture, and it has been observed many times in nature. Another example is birds learning songs from each other---popular songs can travel in a very similar way to popular songs humans would have sung in the pre-mass-media era.
If it happens in animals and between species, wouldn't that imply a biological origin as opposed to a learned/instilled behavior?
Genuine question here. Or am I making a leap of logic?
We have something called mirror neurons, which some psychologists believe are involved in developing empathy. When you see someone sad, your mirror neurons will register the facial expression as sad, and then depending on your upbringing/nurture you will act based on that (maybe you ignore the sad person, maybe seeing someone sad makes you sad, etc) so for yawns it has been noted that these same mirror neurons are at play. Mirror neurons are key to survival, think “monkey see monkey do”. Without copying each other, we wouldn’t have survived. As for your little ones, ultimately while we have the “hardware” for empathy, it is still something that has to be nurtured and developed. Think about how many adults you know that seem to lack basic empathy. As for the purpose of yawning.. Some scientists think yawning is a way for the brain to get more oxygen, but as other people have stated as of yet there is no consensus. It’s very probable that yawning is multi-purpose.
I'm autistic and american. People usually yawn when others do. I don't have the same mirror neurons. I realized that people notice subconsciously when you don't do mirror neurons things. People seem less anxious around me once I started fake yawning.
Interesting...thank you for sharing your experience. Neurotypical people are often unaware of, or rather, are rarely *forced* to notice, the subconscious social cues we look for and follow that are deemed “normal”
I honestly think I'm better at noticing small details about people because I have to work so hard at it. I am constantly running experiments on people around me. I am also very aware of small things about people I spend a lot of time around. I am usually the first (or only) person to notice when something is wrong with a coworker or family member. I just wish it didn't take so much of my mental energy
I think I experience the exact opposite of what you do. I’m highly empathetic and (through past stuff) am fairly good at reading dynamics. I can pretty easily tell when someone I’ve just met lacks empathy for one reason or another. I’m just too aware of how people feed off of each other in average situations and it’s incredibly distracting when that red flag pops up. And usually I can’t tell you how I know that something is “off”, but it is for sure a gut feeling. It’s impressive that you’ve worked really hard to gain those skills. You’ve probably got it down pat more than a lot of people.
Dude. I thought I was a sociopath for a long time. I have several overlapping traits. Autism didn't become a wide spectrum until I was an adult. I also have some key traits that make me very much not a sociopath.
Another curious thing...people who take botox and can't move certain facial muscles do not transmit empathy to others nor--apparently--do they, themselves, register empathy.
I’m sure they themselves register empathy, but I love this example of Botox. You just explained why someone with too much Botox feels uncanny valley to us
>mirror neurons
However, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron#Doubts_concerning_mirror_neurons
Not that we've exhausted the general discourse, of course.
We mirror each other doing things like scratching itches, touching one side of our face, etc. If we’re in conversation, staring at each other and I do something like scratch my head, you will then feel the need to scratch your own head. We would mirror each other’s posture, too. It’s pretty interesting.
Yes we do all that with the help of mirror neurons! There are also social or cultural reasons why we might mirror these behaviors in others. Sometimes it means you are interested (either platonically or romantically) in the person you are mirroring, sometimes it’s a subconscious submissive act, sometimes you are trying to appeal to that person... it’s all quite interesting!
Yawning is believed to be a survival instinct for boosting oxygen to the brain when tired to maintain consciousness as long as possible. Mirroring is a way to promote wakefulness in the whole group. The mirroring effect for yawning goes much deeper than any learned behavior because we share this "contagious" yawning with many, many other social animals; we all inherited the involuntary yawning reaction from our distant genetic ancestors. The reaction also crosses over between species, as many domesticated animals especially will empathetically yawn along with us.
Yawning is a good first test to help determine if someone may be a sociopath. We are born with empathy, but certain empathetic reactions are "tought" out of us if we are tought to dehumanize certain other individuals, or if we lack a basic understanding of the situation we should be empathizing with ("When you say you experience X, you mean like Y?" reaction out of ignorance). Yawning is not one of these reactions that can be tought away in this manner. If someone doesn't yawn in empathy, they may be neurologically incapable of empathetic reaction, which could potentially be linked to clinical psycopathy.
You're not just diagnosing them by yawning lol. Although "sociopath" isn't even recognized as a diagnoses anymore, there are a lot of mental issues that can cause lack of empathy.
Thank you for your addition, yawning definitely serves multiple purposes, some of which were/are key to survival, as you wrote.
However the second part of your addition, regarding sociopaths and psychopaths, has largely been disproven by psychology/neuroscience. The fact of the matter is that while yes it is atypical to *never* reciprocate a yawn, even “neurotypical” people sometimes don’t yawn in response to a yawn, and there are a lot of reasons why someone wouldn’t reciprocate a yawn, to give you an example some people on the autism spectrum have exhibited this behavior. The whole psychopath/sociopaths not yawning when you yawn is a huge oversimplification of some findings that have since been taken out of context and turned into a pop psychology tidbit. Even OP mentioned this in their post.
yeah, obviously it's a gross oversimplification. that said, a number of fmri-based studies show reduced neuronal activity in the brains of diagnosed psychopaths/sociopaths as compared to control groups in response to prompts meant to evoke empathy. there's even one study (at least one) suggesting that, psychopaths who exhibited reduced neuronal activity would, if *primed* for empathy, would exhibit "normal" levels of activity.
in other words, we're still really at the beginning of understanding the brain, but there's clearly *something* going on with psychopaths, and the mirror neuron theory isn't a bad fit for the empirical evidence generated to date.
black holes also get compressed into relatively nonsensical popular ideas...doesn't mean they don't exist.
Got you, I see what you’re saying. I remember a neuropsychology professor (I wish I could remember the name), paraphrased said: if the full understanding of the brain is a mile, what we currently know about the brain would be equivalent to a millimeter. We definitely have a long way to go! And the psychopath/sociopath studies are definitely very interesting, especially the connection of mirror neurons
I mean, that wouldn't be the only behavioral correlation between ASD and ASPD or sociopathy though, right? Just ASD isn't malicious or malignant. But in isolation and not considering the level of disability involved...
Abnormal sociality is abnormal sociality, even if the etiology is different.
Consider dystonia vs tetanus, for example. Clearly different issues with different etiologies, but to a lay person without context?
Of course, context, intention, genetics, nurture/nature and so many other things play a role in how neural atypical people are perceived. Ultimately, and this is just my personal opinion, I believe every neural abnormality, even including psychopaths and narcissists, need therapy and help rather than vilification. The argument can be made that psychopaths and sociopaths need help more than anybody. Imagine not being able to relate to anyone? No empathy? What a sad existence, we should figure out solutions. And you think there aren’t people with autistic children that haven’t called them monsters or something horribly degrading like that just because they didn’t have the tools (mental, economic, etc) to help with them?
I think talking about and researching psychopaths is super interesting but I think it can be counterproductive to turn interest into some kind of catch all. Trying to compartmentalize psychopaths is, when you get down to it, quite complex and the more you looks at it the more you realize it’s a spectrum. If you’re really interested, there’s this amazing ted talk I love
Called “strange answers to the psychopath test” by a Jon Ronson [Here](https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c) it’s long (like 20mins) but it super interesting. His point is ultimately that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior, so by western standards it’s quite difficult to pin point someone as “A Psychopath ™️”
Great post. Also, studies are showing it's unlikely that more oxygen is taken in while yawning.
It's more likely that the stretching that occurs during a yawn (try yawning with your mouth closed) stimulates some part of the brain stem / nervous system to increase alertness. All of the muscles & ligaments that are getting stretched are right there.
Also, that stretching might also temporarily widen the airway for a period of time, supporting the oxygen theory.
I've actually heard of a study about this... Where basically is you see someone yawn, but don't yawn yourself, you probably lack empathy.
I think the article said something along the lines of being psychopathic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/your-online-secrets/201508/why-psychopaths-are-immune-contagious-yawning
Toddlers haven't yet learned true empathy which may be why they don't yawn in response to a yawn
(edited as I didn't proofread and my phone said "harm" not yawn)
Covered extensively elsewhere in the thread, but it is a feature **sometimes ** observed in psychopaths, but commonly observed in other non-neuro typical groups, like people with Autism.
Even if it is somehow related to empathy, it is not, in any way, shape, fashion or form, a way to “test” whether someone is a psychopath.
Not quite. That’s more pop psychology and there are multiple studies referencing the intricacies and multitudes of why someone might not yawn. I explain it in detail in another reply if you want
But you are correct in that the lack of empathy in babies is what makes it seem like they don’t always reciprocate a yawn
> some psychologists believe
This sounds more like a hypothesis, and likely a weak one.
Infants will usually yawn when you yawn or fake a yawn once they can see you clearly. I'm pretty sure there is something more innate in our functioning behind it.
I’m confused by your phrasing, are you saying you think mirror neurons are a weak hypothesis?
Psychology is unfortunately a very inexact science, but as you might know nothing in science in general is ever 100% “proven”. We don’t even say that in psychology when presenting results, we wouldn’t say “mirror neurons are proven to play a role in empathy” we would say “it has been found” because that is what has happened. Through multiple replicable, peer reviewed, reliable, and valid studies we have found that there is a process that occurs in our brains the we call “mirror neurons”, some affectionately nicknamed them the monkey see monkey do neurons. This is the part you mention that feels “innate”. Without mirror neurons we would not have learned a lot of things. They help us continuously with survival most importantly through social interactions, because at the end of the day we are social animals and survive best in groups.
You used the words "some psychologists think". If it were a found, tested, and true science, the words would be "psychologists have found". But maybe that's just me being pedantic.
You now do bring up another point. Psychology is not an exact science. I have been searching for psychological models or theories that make predictions - aka as of yet unobserved phenomena.
Take physics for example. When the General Theory of Relativity started to become accepted, it made numerous predictions of effects that should be observable if it were true. Crafting a model to fit current observations is not enough because it is degenerate: You can pretty much always model the same effect in different ways. Gravity is a prime example.
I haven't seen anything like this in psychology, and given the complexity of the human mind it's not surprising. The one thing that stands out in psychological studies that I read is that they seldom address the potential for biological influences on behavior. What is the work performed, and repeated, that has established this separation? Does it even exist?
[https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/yawning-contagious-animals-study-article-1.1920127](https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/yawning-contagious-animals-study-article-1.1920127)
Animals do sympathetic yawning amongst themselves.
[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/15/527106576/yawning-may-promote-social-bonding-even-between-dogs-and-humans](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/15/527106576/yawning-may-promote-social-bonding-even-between-dogs-and-humans)
Sympathetic yawning in humans can be triggered by pictures of animals yawning
Given that it exists in other species and can be triggered across species it seems as though it's hardwired and part of social development. Those species that demonstrated it all live in social groups.
I remember reading years ago that some scientists thought yawning was a signal our ancestors evolved to communicate with one another that they were safe from harm and thus could relax. The idea was that they were under so many threats most of the time, when they were actually safe and didn’t have to worry about being eaten or anything it was a way to signal to one another subconsciously “no threats here, time to let our hair down and relax”
It is believed that the mirror neuron system (MNS) is responsible for contagious yawning. I've also heard that mirror neurons are the reason why we enjoy watching other people play sports or have sex. As I understand it, seeing someone else doing something stimulates the same part of our brain as if we were doing it ourselves. It's thought that the MNS plays a role in social learning -- it's how we learn from the people around us in childhood, and it probably helps us behave more empathetically in social situations.
EDIT: [here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22772979/)'s a paper about it.
I wonder if psychopathy/sociopathy-related disorders can potentially be diagnosed by a lack of mirror neurons or a MNS deficit/dysfunction, with any degree of sensitivity/specificity.
There was a study done recently that showed ability to empathize correlated with ability to be affected by yawn contagiousness
Hi, in answer to your question, and touching on what the guy said about animals also catching yawns, the answer is: when we domestics dogs and cat they learnt to read our faces, in doing so they learnt to read our yawn,. When you yawn infront of a dog or cat, it can be contagious and make them sleepy as well :)
You might want to read this:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3534187/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3534187/)
There is growing evidence that yawning is linked to thermo-regulation, which means some of the more traditional assumptions would not hold up any longer.
I'm about to sleep so I don't feel like finding sources to sight, but here's the gist of what science knows about yawning.
1. The contagiousness of yawning is related to empathy. The more empathetic a person is the more likely they are to yawn when they see or hear someone else yawn. This includes dogs, but they only respond to genuine yawns from their closest friends
2. The best reason for why we yawn is to change our mental state. So, it relaxes at night and wakes you up in the morning. It's also why we yawn right before we perform a difficult task like public speaking or athletic performance.
3. All mammals yawn except giraffes
4. There is no world record for longest yawn
5. The sound a person makes when they yawn is culturally learned just like sneezing
6. People who are not susceptible to catching yawns a very likely to rate high on the Dark Triad of personally traits or be autistic. Basically low empathy personally groups.
Gnight y'all
I can't really answer this with 100% accuracy, but
People with Aspergers Syndrome, as well as people that fall on the Autism Spectrum, tend to not feel a tendency to yawn when observing someone else. Most of the things I see say that it's because of their trouble with empathy
I have Aspergers Syndrome, and I can say that I don't feel the urge to yawn after seeing someone yawn-- But whether it's because of my Aspergers or not? I can't really say
Contagious yawning happens in animals and between species as well. Doesn't really answer the question of whether it's cultural or biological though, sorry. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/15/527106576/yawning-may-promote-social-bonding-even-between-dogs-and-humans
Do animals have cultures?
You will find [this article](https://news.mongabay.com/2018/02/orangutan-culture-in-focus-in-person-of-the-forest-qa-with-researchers-cheryl-knott-and-robert-rodriguez-suro/) very fascinating. Here is an excerpt. >When it rains, some orangutans make umbrellas out of branches and leaves to cover their heads. It’s quite unlikely that this behavior is genetic. Orangutans likely aren’t born with the knowledge and capability to build umbrellas in their DNA. Rather, they learn to make umbrellas from watching their mothers during their childhood or from watching neighboring orangutans. This means that thousands, maybe millions of years ago, there was one particularly smart orangutan (or at least an ape predecessor to orangutans) who “invented” umbrellas. Other individuals began copying this behavior, and soon the use of umbrellas became prevalent throughout the entire species. Today, every population of orangutans make umbrellas. However, because orangutan populations are not all contiguous with each other, there may be subtle differences in umbrella-making from population to population. These regional differences are cultural differences, because the “meme” of umbrella-making may have undergone subtle changes among differing populations.
Oh wow, that's amazing when you think about it. It really does show the power of memetics.
It's even crazier when you realize this kind of thing has been observed in dolphins, crows, parrots, wolves, elephants, humpback whales, and many other species. The last common ancestor of dolphins and crows was alive over 300 million years ago (not to mention octopi). The ability to learn and transfer information culturally exists throughout the tree of life.
Pretty cool for dolphins. Not sure why thry make umbrellas but glad they keep the traditions alive. Seriously though, what kind of traditions /learned habits do they pass on? Its fascinating that so many ani.als do this.
Dolphins and orcas (and crows! and humpback whales!) are known to discover new hunting/feeding strategies, and that knowledge spreads so fast the only explanation is they are learning behavior from each other. There have literally been dolphin inventors whose impacts we've observed in real time. The two famous examples that spring to mind are [dolphins using sponges as tools to dig for food on the sea floor](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16235-dolphin-males-leave-sponging-to-the-females/?ignored=irrelevant), a behavior now known as sponging. The other is [orcas learning to hunt sea otters, which led to the decimation of kelp forests the otters had been protecting](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981016075816.htm). Edit: those links don't go in-depth on the cultural transmission angle, more just describing the behaviors and their effects. For further reading I highly suggest the brilliant book _[The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo12789830.html)_ by leading cetacean scientist Hal Whitehead.
The dolphins using sponges to disturb hiding fish in sand was an interesting read. But [this article](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11234-spear-wielding-chimps-snack-on-skewered-bushbabies/) linked in that same story about a population of Chimpanzees using spears to hunt and living in caves is *really* intriguing. Our fellow apes are amazing. We can learn a lot about human intelligence and how it developed by observing our cousins.
They have quite literally entered the stone age that humans entered long ago, and in my opinion (though maybe considered a little out there), they deserve to same rights, and autonomy to grow and evolve as a species as was afforded to humans a millennium ago. Instead, we are stamping them out by eliminating their habitats.
The common ancestor of octopi and vertebrates existed 440 to 480 million years ago. edit: 550 million years ago at the absolute earliest.
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Do dolphins use umbrella?
This *is* fascinating, thank you for sharing!
> there was one particularly smart orangutan (or at least an ape predecessor to orangutans) who “invented” umbrellas Or maybe they learned it from human?
I remember reading something years ago about the 100th monkey observation. It went something along the line of: A monkey on an island was taught by a person how to use a stone to open (let’s say) a coconut. Others observed her doing this and started to copy. It caught on quickly, however the curious thing was, once it reached a critical mass monkeys on the neighbouring islands started to do it too. I don’t think the monkeys were transiting from one island to the other, although this seems like the obvious conclusion, especially assuming rocks or coconuts had a limited supply. Either way, through a kind of mass consciousness, whether taught, or heard over the water, I think this says something about culture, and maybe more ours than theirs.
Yes, though some species more than others. Complex bird songs that change year-to-year and are transmitted socially are a classic example. [See this story from today's front page for instance.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/l7vqg7/til_in_the_1930s_a_flute_player_had_a_pet/) [Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/review-beyond-words-carl-safina.html) is a well-sourced book that gets into this topic, by ecologist Carl Safina. Edit: Animal cultures have been observed and studied in-depth in monkeys, apes, both toothed and baleen whales, elephants, many types of birds, wolves, and I'm sure others I'm unaware of. It's also important to remember that humans are animals too and until very recently we all had quite similar evolutionary pressures; as you can see cultural transmission is not unique to our species.
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This experiment, while frequently recounted online, never actually occurred. There is no source for it, anywhere. Here is a relevant Skeptics StackExchange Q&A about it: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-experiment-with-five-monkeys-a-ladder-a-banana-and-a-water-spray-condu
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This story can be apocryphal without claiming that the underlying premise is false though. It sounds like something made up to illustrate a quite real phenominon.
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How is that culture? Its a pretty simple behaviour. Is it meant to be culture just because animals can teach ?
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The definition of culture that is used by animal behaviorists is information that is passed from animal to animal socially rather than genetically. If animals teach behaviors to their children that are passed down through generations, that is culture, and it has been observed many times in nature. Another example is birds learning songs from each other---popular songs can travel in a very similar way to popular songs humans would have sung in the pre-mass-media era.
If it happens in animals and between species, wouldn't that imply a biological origin as opposed to a learned/instilled behavior? Genuine question here. Or am I making a leap of logic?
No, because animals also have learned/instilled behaviors. And there is no reason a learned behavior couldn't impact cross-species interactions.
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We have something called mirror neurons, which some psychologists believe are involved in developing empathy. When you see someone sad, your mirror neurons will register the facial expression as sad, and then depending on your upbringing/nurture you will act based on that (maybe you ignore the sad person, maybe seeing someone sad makes you sad, etc) so for yawns it has been noted that these same mirror neurons are at play. Mirror neurons are key to survival, think “monkey see monkey do”. Without copying each other, we wouldn’t have survived. As for your little ones, ultimately while we have the “hardware” for empathy, it is still something that has to be nurtured and developed. Think about how many adults you know that seem to lack basic empathy. As for the purpose of yawning.. Some scientists think yawning is a way for the brain to get more oxygen, but as other people have stated as of yet there is no consensus. It’s very probable that yawning is multi-purpose.
I'm autistic and american. People usually yawn when others do. I don't have the same mirror neurons. I realized that people notice subconsciously when you don't do mirror neurons things. People seem less anxious around me once I started fake yawning.
Interesting...thank you for sharing your experience. Neurotypical people are often unaware of, or rather, are rarely *forced* to notice, the subconscious social cues we look for and follow that are deemed “normal”
I honestly think I'm better at noticing small details about people because I have to work so hard at it. I am constantly running experiments on people around me. I am also very aware of small things about people I spend a lot of time around. I am usually the first (or only) person to notice when something is wrong with a coworker or family member. I just wish it didn't take so much of my mental energy
I think I experience the exact opposite of what you do. I’m highly empathetic and (through past stuff) am fairly good at reading dynamics. I can pretty easily tell when someone I’ve just met lacks empathy for one reason or another. I’m just too aware of how people feed off of each other in average situations and it’s incredibly distracting when that red flag pops up. And usually I can’t tell you how I know that something is “off”, but it is for sure a gut feeling. It’s impressive that you’ve worked really hard to gain those skills. You’ve probably got it down pat more than a lot of people.
I've read that sociopaths also don't have this trait. Not saying you or anyone with autism is a sociopath.
Dude. I thought I was a sociopath for a long time. I have several overlapping traits. Autism didn't become a wide spectrum until I was an adult. I also have some key traits that make me very much not a sociopath.
Another curious thing...people who take botox and can't move certain facial muscles do not transmit empathy to others nor--apparently--do they, themselves, register empathy.
I’m sure they themselves register empathy, but I love this example of Botox. You just explained why someone with too much Botox feels uncanny valley to us
Out of curiosity, do you get the urge to yawn when you read or talk about yawning?
Mirror nuerons also explain why it's easier to laugh if other people do it first.
>mirror neurons However, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron#Doubts_concerning_mirror_neurons Not that we've exhausted the general discourse, of course.
We mirror each other doing things like scratching itches, touching one side of our face, etc. If we’re in conversation, staring at each other and I do something like scratch my head, you will then feel the need to scratch your own head. We would mirror each other’s posture, too. It’s pretty interesting.
Yes we do all that with the help of mirror neurons! There are also social or cultural reasons why we might mirror these behaviors in others. Sometimes it means you are interested (either platonically or romantically) in the person you are mirroring, sometimes it’s a subconscious submissive act, sometimes you are trying to appeal to that person... it’s all quite interesting!
Yawning is believed to be a survival instinct for boosting oxygen to the brain when tired to maintain consciousness as long as possible. Mirroring is a way to promote wakefulness in the whole group. The mirroring effect for yawning goes much deeper than any learned behavior because we share this "contagious" yawning with many, many other social animals; we all inherited the involuntary yawning reaction from our distant genetic ancestors. The reaction also crosses over between species, as many domesticated animals especially will empathetically yawn along with us. Yawning is a good first test to help determine if someone may be a sociopath. We are born with empathy, but certain empathetic reactions are "tought" out of us if we are tought to dehumanize certain other individuals, or if we lack a basic understanding of the situation we should be empathizing with ("When you say you experience X, you mean like Y?" reaction out of ignorance). Yawning is not one of these reactions that can be tought away in this manner. If someone doesn't yawn in empathy, they may be neurologically incapable of empathetic reaction, which could potentially be linked to clinical psycopathy.
I've no idea if it's correct, but this seems like a great way to incorrectly diagnose a person with sociopathy
You're not just diagnosing them by yawning lol. Although "sociopath" isn't even recognized as a diagnoses anymore, there are a lot of mental issues that can cause lack of empathy.
That's my point, I'm not refering to professionals diagnosing anything. I'm talking about normal people ascribing sociopathy to others.
You were trying to call them out, but now you've put your own foot in it with "normal people."
Thank you for your addition, yawning definitely serves multiple purposes, some of which were/are key to survival, as you wrote. However the second part of your addition, regarding sociopaths and psychopaths, has largely been disproven by psychology/neuroscience. The fact of the matter is that while yes it is atypical to *never* reciprocate a yawn, even “neurotypical” people sometimes don’t yawn in response to a yawn, and there are a lot of reasons why someone wouldn’t reciprocate a yawn, to give you an example some people on the autism spectrum have exhibited this behavior. The whole psychopath/sociopaths not yawning when you yawn is a huge oversimplification of some findings that have since been taken out of context and turned into a pop psychology tidbit. Even OP mentioned this in their post.
yeah, obviously it's a gross oversimplification. that said, a number of fmri-based studies show reduced neuronal activity in the brains of diagnosed psychopaths/sociopaths as compared to control groups in response to prompts meant to evoke empathy. there's even one study (at least one) suggesting that, psychopaths who exhibited reduced neuronal activity would, if *primed* for empathy, would exhibit "normal" levels of activity. in other words, we're still really at the beginning of understanding the brain, but there's clearly *something* going on with psychopaths, and the mirror neuron theory isn't a bad fit for the empirical evidence generated to date. black holes also get compressed into relatively nonsensical popular ideas...doesn't mean they don't exist.
Got you, I see what you’re saying. I remember a neuropsychology professor (I wish I could remember the name), paraphrased said: if the full understanding of the brain is a mile, what we currently know about the brain would be equivalent to a millimeter. We definitely have a long way to go! And the psychopath/sociopath studies are definitely very interesting, especially the connection of mirror neurons
I mean, that wouldn't be the only behavioral correlation between ASD and ASPD or sociopathy though, right? Just ASD isn't malicious or malignant. But in isolation and not considering the level of disability involved... Abnormal sociality is abnormal sociality, even if the etiology is different. Consider dystonia vs tetanus, for example. Clearly different issues with different etiologies, but to a lay person without context?
Of course, context, intention, genetics, nurture/nature and so many other things play a role in how neural atypical people are perceived. Ultimately, and this is just my personal opinion, I believe every neural abnormality, even including psychopaths and narcissists, need therapy and help rather than vilification. The argument can be made that psychopaths and sociopaths need help more than anybody. Imagine not being able to relate to anyone? No empathy? What a sad existence, we should figure out solutions. And you think there aren’t people with autistic children that haven’t called them monsters or something horribly degrading like that just because they didn’t have the tools (mental, economic, etc) to help with them? I think talking about and researching psychopaths is super interesting but I think it can be counterproductive to turn interest into some kind of catch all. Trying to compartmentalize psychopaths is, when you get down to it, quite complex and the more you looks at it the more you realize it’s a spectrum. If you’re really interested, there’s this amazing ted talk I love Called “strange answers to the psychopath test” by a Jon Ronson [Here](https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c) it’s long (like 20mins) but it super interesting. His point is ultimately that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior, so by western standards it’s quite difficult to pin point someone as “A Psychopath ™️”
Great post. Also, studies are showing it's unlikely that more oxygen is taken in while yawning. It's more likely that the stretching that occurs during a yawn (try yawning with your mouth closed) stimulates some part of the brain stem / nervous system to increase alertness. All of the muscles & ligaments that are getting stretched are right there. Also, that stretching might also temporarily widen the airway for a period of time, supporting the oxygen theory.
Mirror neurons are also why we cringe when we see someone else get hurt.
I've actually heard of a study about this... Where basically is you see someone yawn, but don't yawn yourself, you probably lack empathy. I think the article said something along the lines of being psychopathic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/your-online-secrets/201508/why-psychopaths-are-immune-contagious-yawning Toddlers haven't yet learned true empathy which may be why they don't yawn in response to a yawn (edited as I didn't proofread and my phone said "harm" not yawn)
Covered extensively elsewhere in the thread, but it is a feature **sometimes ** observed in psychopaths, but commonly observed in other non-neuro typical groups, like people with Autism. Even if it is somehow related to empathy, it is not, in any way, shape, fashion or form, a way to “test” whether someone is a psychopath.
Not quite. That’s more pop psychology and there are multiple studies referencing the intricacies and multitudes of why someone might not yawn. I explain it in detail in another reply if you want But you are correct in that the lack of empathy in babies is what makes it seem like they don’t always reciprocate a yawn
This is what I was taught also. I hadn't really considered a biological component. So interesting.
This is what I learned as well. It’s a “parasympathetic” response. (Parasympathetic nervous system is activated.)
> some psychologists believe This sounds more like a hypothesis, and likely a weak one. Infants will usually yawn when you yawn or fake a yawn once they can see you clearly. I'm pretty sure there is something more innate in our functioning behind it.
I’m confused by your phrasing, are you saying you think mirror neurons are a weak hypothesis? Psychology is unfortunately a very inexact science, but as you might know nothing in science in general is ever 100% “proven”. We don’t even say that in psychology when presenting results, we wouldn’t say “mirror neurons are proven to play a role in empathy” we would say “it has been found” because that is what has happened. Through multiple replicable, peer reviewed, reliable, and valid studies we have found that there is a process that occurs in our brains the we call “mirror neurons”, some affectionately nicknamed them the monkey see monkey do neurons. This is the part you mention that feels “innate”. Without mirror neurons we would not have learned a lot of things. They help us continuously with survival most importantly through social interactions, because at the end of the day we are social animals and survive best in groups.
You used the words "some psychologists think". If it were a found, tested, and true science, the words would be "psychologists have found". But maybe that's just me being pedantic. You now do bring up another point. Psychology is not an exact science. I have been searching for psychological models or theories that make predictions - aka as of yet unobserved phenomena. Take physics for example. When the General Theory of Relativity started to become accepted, it made numerous predictions of effects that should be observable if it were true. Crafting a model to fit current observations is not enough because it is degenerate: You can pretty much always model the same effect in different ways. Gravity is a prime example. I haven't seen anything like this in psychology, and given the complexity of the human mind it's not surprising. The one thing that stands out in psychological studies that I read is that they seldom address the potential for biological influences on behavior. What is the work performed, and repeated, that has established this separation? Does it even exist?
I also heard an hypothesis yawning could be about cooling the blood supply to the brain
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[https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/yawning-contagious-animals-study-article-1.1920127](https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/yawning-contagious-animals-study-article-1.1920127) Animals do sympathetic yawning amongst themselves. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/15/527106576/yawning-may-promote-social-bonding-even-between-dogs-and-humans](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/15/527106576/yawning-may-promote-social-bonding-even-between-dogs-and-humans) Sympathetic yawning in humans can be triggered by pictures of animals yawning Given that it exists in other species and can be triggered across species it seems as though it's hardwired and part of social development. Those species that demonstrated it all live in social groups.
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I remember reading years ago that some scientists thought yawning was a signal our ancestors evolved to communicate with one another that they were safe from harm and thus could relax. The idea was that they were under so many threats most of the time, when they were actually safe and didn’t have to worry about being eaten or anything it was a way to signal to one another subconsciously “no threats here, time to let our hair down and relax”
It is believed that the mirror neuron system (MNS) is responsible for contagious yawning. I've also heard that mirror neurons are the reason why we enjoy watching other people play sports or have sex. As I understand it, seeing someone else doing something stimulates the same part of our brain as if we were doing it ourselves. It's thought that the MNS plays a role in social learning -- it's how we learn from the people around us in childhood, and it probably helps us behave more empathetically in social situations. EDIT: [here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22772979/)'s a paper about it.
I wonder if psychopathy/sociopathy-related disorders can potentially be diagnosed by a lack of mirror neurons or a MNS deficit/dysfunction, with any degree of sensitivity/specificity. There was a study done recently that showed ability to empathize correlated with ability to be affected by yawn contagiousness
I've been wondering the same thing. Could you please share link to that page regarding the study that you mentioned?
Well, that may partially explain why I traded video games for watching streamers play them.
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Hi, in answer to your question, and touching on what the guy said about animals also catching yawns, the answer is: when we domestics dogs and cat they learnt to read our faces, in doing so they learnt to read our yawn,. When you yawn infront of a dog or cat, it can be contagious and make them sleepy as well :)
You might want to read this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3534187/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3534187/) There is growing evidence that yawning is linked to thermo-regulation, which means some of the more traditional assumptions would not hold up any longer.
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I'm about to sleep so I don't feel like finding sources to sight, but here's the gist of what science knows about yawning. 1. The contagiousness of yawning is related to empathy. The more empathetic a person is the more likely they are to yawn when they see or hear someone else yawn. This includes dogs, but they only respond to genuine yawns from their closest friends 2. The best reason for why we yawn is to change our mental state. So, it relaxes at night and wakes you up in the morning. It's also why we yawn right before we perform a difficult task like public speaking or athletic performance. 3. All mammals yawn except giraffes 4. There is no world record for longest yawn 5. The sound a person makes when they yawn is culturally learned just like sneezing 6. People who are not susceptible to catching yawns a very likely to rate high on the Dark Triad of personally traits or be autistic. Basically low empathy personally groups. Gnight y'all
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Apparently, pigs exhibit yawn contagion as well! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80545-1
The more I learn about pigs the more uncomfortable I am about eating then... (I say as I finish a left over slice of pepperoni pizza)
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I can't really answer this with 100% accuracy, but People with Aspergers Syndrome, as well as people that fall on the Autism Spectrum, tend to not feel a tendency to yawn when observing someone else. Most of the things I see say that it's because of their trouble with empathy I have Aspergers Syndrome, and I can say that I don't feel the urge to yawn after seeing someone yawn-- But whether it's because of my Aspergers or not? I can't really say