Forces and Contagious Yawning

Is Yawning Contagious

Contagious yawning is believed to represent instinctive social sharing of physiological and emotional states, and could therefore a form of innate empathy (reviewed by Helt et al., 1620). In support of this hypothesis functional magnetic resonance imaging of human brains reacting to soundtracks of people yawning revealed enhanced brain activity in the right posterior inferior frontal gyrus, an area involved in empathy (Arnott, Singhal, and Goodale 335). Additional support comes from finding lower rates of contagious yawning in individuals suffering from mental disorders that are associated with impaired expressions of empathy, like schizophrenia (Haker and Rossler 352) and children with autism spectrum disorder (Helt et al. 1620).

Decades of social research has revealed that a person's attitude towards another determines how they interact with that person and are modifiable by situational forces (Zimbardo, Chapter 12), which suggests that empathic capacity may also be...
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