Researchers still know little about yawning and several theories exist to explain why yawning occurs. One such theory is the “social bonding theory”. Several studies have shown that yawning is highly contagious among humans, suggesting that yawns might have a social and communicative function. If this is true it begs the question, would other species engage in contagious yawning for the same reasons? And if so, since dogs live with humans and are known to be adept at reading human cues, would dogs also engage in contagious yawning with their humans in order to facilitate their relationships with them? The study highlighted below was designed to find out…
Yawning May Promote Social Bonding Even Between Dogs And …
NPR
On contagious yawning…
Dogs not only catch each others’ yawns, they are susceptible to human yawning as well. In one study, 29 dogs watched a human yawning and 21 of them yawned as well — suggesting that interspecies yawning could help in dog-human communication…
Dogs catch human yawns
The Royal Society Biology Letters
Abstract
This study is the first to demonstrate that human yawns are possibly contagious to domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Twenty-nine dogs observed a human yawning or making control mouth movements. Twenty-one dogs yawned when they observed a human yawning, but control mouth movements did not elicit yawning from any of them. The presence of contagious yawning in dogs suggests that this phenomenon is not specific to primate species and may indicate that dogs possess the capacity for a rudimentary form of empathy. Since yawning is known to modulate the levels of arousal, yawn contagion may help coordinate dog–human interaction and communication…
The current study examined whether contagious yawning can be observed in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative cues. They can follow human gaze and pointing (Hare et al. 2002; Miklósi et al. 2003; Miklósi & Soproni 2006), they can show sensitivity to others’ knowledge states (e.g. indicating the location of a hidden toy more frequently to someone not involved in hiding it than to someone who did the hiding, Virányi et al. 2006) and they are even able to match their own actions to observed human actions (Topál et al. 2006). Dogs’ unique social skills in interacting with humans may be the result of selection pressures during the process of domestication (Hare & Tomasello 2005; Miklósi et al. 2003, 2007). Therefore, there is the potential that dogs may also have developed the capacity for empathy towards humans, and may catch human yawns. However, no empirical studies have been reported, which systematically investigate contagious yawning in dogs.
In the current study, dogs observed a human experimenter yawning (yawning condition) or demonstrating non-yawning mouth movements (control condition). If dogs have the capacity for contagious yawning, they should yawn more in the yawning condition than in the control condition.
Read the study here.
Journal Reference: Dogs catch human yawns, The Royal Society Biology Letters, 2008.
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