Social Presence Diminishes Contagious Yawning in the Laboratory

Social Cognitive Correlates of Contagious Yawning and Smiling

It has been theorized that the contagion of behaviors may be related to social cognitive abilities, but empirical findings are inconsistent. We recorded young adults' behavioral expression of contagious yawning and contagious smiling to video stimuli and employed a multi-method assessment of sociocognitive abilities including self-reported internal experience of emotional contagion, self-reported trait empathy, accuracy on a theory of mind task, and observed helping behavior. Results revealed that contagious yawners reported increases in tiredness from pre- to post-video stimuli exposure, providing support for the internal experience of emotional contagion, and were more likely to provide help to the experimenter relative to non-contagious yawners. Contagious smilers showed stably high levels of self-reported happiness from pre- to post-video exposure, were more likely to provide help to the experimenter, and had increased accuracy on a theory of mind task relative to non-contagious smilers. There were no differences in self-reported trait empathy for contagious versus non-contagious yawners or smilers. Contagious yawning may be related to some basic (i.e., emotional contagion) and advanced (i.e., helping behavior) sociocognitive processes, whereas contagious smiling is related to some advanced sociocognitive processes (i.e., theory of mind and helping behavior).

Hearing Someone Laugh and Seeing Someone Yawn: Modality-Specific Contagion of Laughter and Yawning in the Absence of Others

Laughter and yawning can both occur spontaneously and are highly contagious forms of social behavior. When occurring contagiously, laughter and yawning are usually confounded with a social situation and it is difficult to determine to which degree the social situation or stimulus itself contribute to its contagion. While contagious yawning can be reliably elicited in lab when no other individuals are present, such studies are more sparse for laughter. Moreover, laughter and yawning are multimodal stimuli with both an auditory and a visual component: laughter is primarily characterized as a stereotyped vocalization whereas yawning is a predominantly visual signal and it is not known to which degree the visual and auditory modalities affect the contagion of laughter and yawning. We investigated how these two sensory modalities contribute to the contagion of laughter and yawning under controlled laboratory conditions in the absence of a social situation that might confound their contagion. Subjects were presented with naturally produced laughter and yawning in three sensory modalities (audio, visual, audio-visual), and we recorded their reaction to these stimuli. Contagious responses differed for laughter and yawning: overall, laughter elicited more contagious responses than yawning, albeit mostly smiling rather than overt laughter. While the audio-visual condition elicited most contagious responses overall, laughter was more contagious in the auditory modality, and yawning was more contagious in the visual modality. Furthermore, laughter became decreasingly contagious over time, while yawning remained steadily contagious. We discuss these results based on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic trajectories of laughter and yawning.

People that score high on psychopathic traits are less likely to yawn contagiously

Considerable variation exists in the contagiousness of yawning, and numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the proximate mechanisms involved in this response. Yet, findings within the psychological literature are mixed, with many studies conducted on relatively small and homogeneous samples. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend upon research suggesting a negative relationship between psychopathic traits and yawn contagion in community samples. In the largest study of contagious yawning to date (N = 458), which included both university students and community members from across 50 nationalities, participants completed an online study in which they self-reported on their yawn contagion to a video stimulus and completed four measures of psychopathy: the primary and secondary psychopathy scales from the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRPS), the psychopathy construct from the Dirty Dozen, and the Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS). Results support previous findings in that participants that yawned contagiously tended to score lower on the combined and primary measures of psychopathy. That said, tiredness was the strongest predictor across all models. These findings align with functional accounts of spontaneous and contagious yawning and a generalized impairment in overall patterns of behavioral contagion and biobehavioral synchrony among people high in psychopathic traits.

Earlier than previously thought: Yawn contagion in preschool children

Yawning is a primitive and stereotyped motor action involving orofacial, laryngeal, pharyngeal, thoracic and abdominal muscles. Contagious yawning, an involuntarily action induced by viewing or listening to others' yawns, has been demonstrated in human and several non-human species. Previous studies with humans showed that infants and preschool children, socially separated during video experiments, were not infected by others' yawns. Here, we tested the occurrence of yawn contagion in 129 preschool children (ranging from 2.5 to 5.5 years) belonging to five different classes by video recording them in their classrooms during the ordinary school activities. As it occurs in adult humans, children of all ages were infected by others' yawns within the 2 min after the perception of the stimulus. The yawn contagion occurred earlier than previously thought. For children, it appears that the natural social setting is more conducive to yawn contagion than the inherently artificial experimental approach. Moreover, children's gender did not affect the level of contagious yawning. The neural, emotional and behavioural traits of preschool children are probably not sufficiently mature to express variability between boys and girls; nevertheless, children appeared to be already well equipped with the 'neural toolkit' necessary for expressing yawn contagion.

Seeing others yawn selectively enhances vigilance: an eye-tracking study of snake detection

While the origin of yawning appears to be physiologic, yawns may also hold a derived communicative function in social species. In particular, the arousal reduction hypothesis states that yawning signals to others that the actor is experiencing a down regulation of arousal and vigilance. If true, seeing another individual yawn might enhance the vigilance of observers to compensate for the reduced mental processing of the yawner. This was tested in humans by assessing how exposure to yawning stimuli alters performance on visual search tasks for detecting snakes (a threatening stimulus) and frogs (a neutral stimulus). In a repeated-measures design, 38 participants completed these tasks separately after viewing yawning and control videos. Eye-tracking was used to measure detection latency and distractor fixation frequency. Replicating previous evolutionary-based research, snakes were detected more rapidly than frogs across trials. Moreover, consistent with the view that yawning holds a distinct signaling function, there were significant interactions for both detection latency and distractor fixation frequency showing that vigilance was selectively enhanced following exposure to yawns. That is, after viewing videos of other people yawning, participants detected snakes more rapidly and were less likely to fixate on distractor frogs during trials. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for a social function to yawning in any species, and imply the presence of a previously unidentified psychological adaptation for preserving group vigilance.

Recording brain activity can function as an implied social presence and alter neural connectivity

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also include brain monitoring technology, and also their impacts on the measured neural activity. We demonstrate that merely informing participants that fMRI has the potential to observe (thought-related) brain activity is sufficient to trigger changes in functional connectivity within and between relevant brain networks that have been previously associated selectively with executive and attentional control as well as self-relevant processing, social cognition, and theory of mind. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, mediated here by recording brain activity with fMRI, can alter brain functional connectivity. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as shining light on a methodological hazard for researchers using equipment to monitor brain activity.

Blood oxytocin concentration positively predicts contagious yawning behavior in children with autism spectrum disorder

Research suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have reduced empathy, as measured by an impaired contagious yawn response, compared to typically developing (TD) children. Other research has failed to replicate this finding, instead attributing this phenomenon to group differences in attention paid to yawn stimuli. A third possibility is that only a subgroup of children with ASD exhibits the impaired contagious yawn response, and that it can be identified biologically. Here we quantified blood concentrations of the "social" neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) and evaluated yawning behavior and attention rates during a laboratory task in children with ASD (N = 34) and TD children (N = 30) aged 6-12 years. No group difference in contagious yawning behavior was found. However, a blood OXT concentration × group (ASD vs. TD) interaction positively predicted contagious yawning behavior (F_1,50  = 7.4987; P = 0.0085). Specifically, blood OXT concentration was positively related to contagious yawning behavior in children with ASD, but not in TD children. This finding was not due to delayed perception of yawn stimuli and was observed whether attention paid to test stimuli and clinical symptom severity were included in the analysis or not. These findings suggest that only a biologically defined subset of children with ASD exhibits reduced empathy, as measured by the impaired contagious yawn response, and that prior conflicting reports of this behavioral phenomenon may be attributable, at least in part, to variable mean OXT concentrations across different ASD study cohorts. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1156-1161. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: People with autism may contagiously yawn (i.e., yawn in response to another's yawn) less often than people without autism. We find that people with autism who have lower levels of blood oxytocin (OXT), a hormone involved in social behavior and empathy, show decreased contagious yawning, but those who have higher blood OXT levels do not differ in contagious yawning from controls. This suggests that decreased contagious yawning may only occur in a biologically defined subset of people with autism.

Manipulating neck temperature alters contagious yawning in humans

The existence of yawning across a diverse array of species has led many researchers to postulate its neurological significance. One hypothesis, which has garnered recent support, posits that yawns function to cool the brain by flushing hyperthermic blood away from the skull while simultaneously introducing a cooler arterial supply. The current study tested this hypothesis by examining how manipulations aimed at modifying carotid artery temperature, which in turn directly alters cranial temperature, influences contagious yawning in humans. Participants held either a warm (46 °C), cold (4 °C) or room temperature (22 °C) pack firmly to their neck, just over their carotid arteries, for a period of five minutes prior to watching a contagious yawning stimulus. Thermographic imaging verified that these manipulations produced predicted changes in temperature at the superomedial orbital area, a region previously used as a noninvasive measure of brain temperature (i.e., the brain temperature tunnel). As predicted by past research, both the urge to yawn and overall yawn frequency significantly diminished in the cooling condition (p < .05). Less than half (48.5%) of the participants in the cooling condition reported the urge to yawn, while this urge was expressed by the vast majority of participants in the warming condition (84.8%). Moreover, there was a threefold difference in the mean number of yawns per participant between the cooling and warming conditions (0.364 compared to 1.121). These findings are consistent with previous research indicating that yawns function as a compensatory brain cooling mechanism.

Contagious yawning in virtual reality is affected by actual, but not simulated, social presence

Contagious yawning occurs in humans and a few other highly social animals following the detection of yawns in others, yet the factors influencing the propagation of this response remain largely unknown. Stemming from earlier laboratory research, we conducted five experiments to investigate the effects of social presence on contagious yawning in virtual reality (VR). We show that, similar to a traditional laboratory setting, having a researcher present during testing significantly inhibited contagious yawning in VR, even though participants were viewing a virtual environment and unable to see the researcher. Unlike previous research, however, manipulating the social presence in VR (i.e., embedding recording devices and humanoid avatars within the simulation) did not affect contagious yawning. These experiments provide further evidence that social presence is a powerful deterrent of yawning in humans, which warrants further investigation. More generally, these findings also have important applications for the use of VR in psychological research. While participants were quite sensitive to social stimuli presented in VR, as evidenced by contagious yawning, our results suggest a major difference in the influence of social factors within real-world and virtual environments. That is, social cues in actual reality appear to dominate and supersede those in VR.

Gender composition mediates social facilitation effect in co-action condition

Working with co-actors is a common work-organization mode. Whether the presence of opposite-sex co-actors (OCs) can induce social facilitation effect and how an actor's performance is influenced by the gender composition of co-actors remain unknown. The present study aims to examine the influence of the gender composition of co-actors on the intensity of the social facilitation effect. In Experiment 1, participants performed visual search tasks alone and in six co-action conditions with varying gender compositions. In Experiment 2, the participants performed modular arithmetic tasks in three conditions with electroencephalogram activity recorded and salivary cortisol measured: alone, with a same-sex co-actor (SC), and with an OC. Results indicated that the social facilitation effect was stronger in the presence of OCs than in the presence of only SCs. The intensities of social facilitation effect resulting from the varying gender composition of co-actors were obtained and compared. A participant's power of alpha band was lower, whereas power of beta band and normalised cortisol level were higher in the presence of an OC than in the presence of an SC. These findings provide insights into the influencing mechanisms of gender composition on the intensity of the social facilitation effect in the co-action condition.

Yawning Detection Sensitivity and Yawning Contagion

Contagious yawning—the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning—is a well-documented phenomenon in humans and animals. The reduced yawn contagion observed in the autistic population suggested that it might be empathy related; however, it is unknown whether such a connection applies to nonclinical populations. We examined influences from both empathy (i.e., autistic traits) and nonempathy factors (i.e., individuals’ perceptual detection sensitivity to yawning, happy, and angry faces) on 41 nonclinical adults. We induced contagious yawning with a 5-minute video and 20 yawning photo stimuli. In addition, we measured participants’ autistic traits (with the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire), eye gaze patterns, and their perceptual thresholds to detect yawning and emotion in human face photos. We found two factors associated with yawning contagion: (a) those more sensitive to detect yawning, but not other emotional expressions, displayed more contagious yawning than those less sensitive to yawning expressions, and (b) female participants exhibited significantly more contagious yawning than male participants. We did not find an association between autistic trait and contagious yawning. Our study offers a working hypothesis for future studies, in that perceptual encoding of yawning interacts with susceptibility to contagious yawning.