Search Here

As young children, we all have wondered why we yawn when we see someone else in the same room yawning. We have discovered and understood with time that yawning is a contagious act.

Apart from us human beings, many of us have also noticed our dogs yawn, almost in response to our own yawning and wondered how the dog was sleepy just when we were too. However, a new research suggests that dogs don't yawn because they are sleepy too. Like humans, contagious yawning in dogs is an empathetic response.

According to the research, dogs catch the yawn from human beings.  The research from Lund University suggests that dogs, like humans, show a trend of contagious yawning. But then, this is not true for young dogs, which, according to the study, are immune to yawn contagion, reports Phys.Org.  

Previous studies have shown that contagious yawning is not just a sign of boredom or fatigue, but also a sign of empathy. This has been proven true for humans, adult chimpanzees, baboons and dogs, and according to researchers, contagious yawning is a sort of behavioral empathetic response.

For the current study, researchers Elainie Alenkær Madsen, PhD, and Tomas Persson, PhD, at Lund University, engaged 35 dogs in Denmark, aged between four and 14 months, in acts of play and cuddling and observed their responses when a human repeatedly yawned or gaped in front of them, or did neither.

The researchers found that only puppies aged seven months and older responded to yawning. This pattern has also been seen in humans. A child starts reacting to contagious yawning only after reaching age 4, which is also the time when children start identifying accurately with others' emotions. Thus, there is a developmental increase in susceptibility to yawn contagion.

The interpretation of the findings, according to the researchers, is that it reflects a general developmental pattern, existent in both humans and other animals, in terms of affective empathy and the ability to identify others' emotions, the report said.

If yawning is considered an empathetic response, the results suggest that empathy and the mimicry develop slowly through the first year of a dog's life. Also, there was some evidence during the research that yawning could signify sleepiness in dogs. Almost half of the dogs during the experiment were so sleepy that the researchers had to prevent them from falling asleep.  

Research on human adults has shown that people quickly respond to the yawns of those who they have an emotional bond with. The current study on the dogs, with familiar and unfamiliar humans, revealed that puppies did not show any preference during the contagious yawning to the people they were familiar with.

The researchers thus conclude that the current experiment reveals that in species that show an empathy-based social modulatory effect on contagious yawning, this behavior only emerges at later stages of development.

The study was published in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.