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Study: Women more prone to contagious yawning

Traci Watson
Special for USA TODAY

Scientists say they’ve found an infection more likely to strike women than men: the yawn.

This file photo shows a girl yawning while waiting to take part in the David Jones Autumn Winter 2016 Fashion Launch model casting in Sydney, Australia, 13 January 2016.

Many of us have felt that irresistible urge to yawn after seeing a colleague or buddy yawn. Though the reasons for this “contagious yawning” are not clear, the new results provide evidence that yawns spread more easily to women than to men. The findings, though not universally accepted, may have implications for why humans “catch” yawns in the first place.

“Women respond more than men” to a yawning friend, says lead study author Elisabetta Palagi of Italy’s University of Pisa, who attributes women’s susceptibility to their powers of empathy. “We are not afraid of yawning in response to others. We have not inhibited that.”

The study's authors had to turn into spies for their science. They secretly observed 100-plus friends and acquaintances over five years, furtively recording when their subjects yawned and under what circumstances, observing them over dinner, aboard trains and in the workplace. Palagi even collected data on her oblivious husband.

It was like being “Big Brother,” Palagi says, laughing. “We took advantage of every possible situation.”

A pattern emerged among subjects susceptible to yawn infection. People were more likely to yawn in response to someone they were close to, and women were more likely to yawn responsively than men, the researchers report in this week’s Royal Society Open Science.

A vast body of research shows women are, on average, more empathetic than men, Palagi says. She thinks the new results bolster the case that contagious yawning is rooted in empathy, the very human tendency to feel and mirror the emotions of those around us.

The study makes a good case that women yawn contagiously more than men, says Duke University geneticist Liz Cirulli, who was not involved with the research. But Cirulli notes that the authors of the new study didn’t test the empathy levels of their subjects, simply assuming that female subjects were more empathetic than men.

“It would make sense” if contagious yawning were based on empathy, Cirulli says. “But it’s not clear from this study that that’s definitely what’s going on.” Palagi responds that there’s no way to measure empathy directly and that ample evidence shows women have greater powers of empathy than men do.

Another researcher expressed yet more skepticism. Other studies have found no gender difference in contagious yawning, says Andrew Gallup of the State University of New York, Oneonta, so he won’t be convinced until other research comes to the same conclusion as Palagi’s.

Whatever the case, even reading about other people yawning can trigger a contagious yawn, according to Palagi. Feel like yawning yet?

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