You know when you see someone else in the classroom yawn you try hard to ignore it, yet several seconds later you too yawn? Contagious yawning has been suggested to communicate sleepiness and stress to other group members in a social situation as well as to provoke arousal in oneself when environmental stimuli does not offer any. Researchers have been wondering whether dogs experience contagious yawning as well, do to their high levels of social communicative skills between each other as well as humans. A study by Buttner and Strasser (2014) was conducted to test whether shelter dogs also respond to human yawns and therefore exhibit contagious yawning. They tested 60 shelter dogs that were exposed to both yawning and non-yawning control stimuli with an unfamiliar person. They also took salivary cortisol samples before and after the experiment from each dog to see whether arousal played a role in contagious yawning. They found that only 12 dogs seemed to yawn in response to the human yawning and no significant findings for the whole population. And that the dogs who did seem to yawn in response did have raised cortisol levels after the experiment compared to their baseline. Although the findings were not significant, yawning between humans and dogs may still be used as a communicative mechanism for arousal states or stress depending on the context and environment.
Reference
Buttner, A, & Strasser, R 2014, 'Contagious yawning, social cognition, and arousal: an investigation of the processes underlying shelter dogs’ responses to human yawns', Animal Cognition, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 95-104.
That is such a divine picture! Such a fascinating topic too. I’m curious as to why yawning would suggest stress. Can you elaborate further?
ReplyDeleteYes, when a dog is stressed they yawn to displace the stress. Humans do it as well, and it is a way to displace a negative emotion or behavior with a neutral one. For instance, when a mouse in a Skinner box is shocked they often become stressed and begin grooming them self. This occurs because they cannot get away from the shock and so they displace the negative feeling of being shocked by grooming. Another example is when a person is in their car stopped at a red light while being late for work. They are already stressed about being late but know they cannot run the red light. So instead they engage in neutral behaviors such as looking in the rear view mirror at the car behind them, checking what they look like in the overhead mirror, or playing with the radio. None of these behaviors help the situation but it is better than sitting there and thinking about how late they will be to work. Yawning is a form of stress relief and is also considered one of the behaviors that can signal others that you are stressed.
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