It’s called yawn contagion, the need to yawn when you see someone else yawning. Increasingly it’s recognized as an empathy based response. Now, new research not only supports that notion but has found that women are more likely to contagiously yawn, than men.
The authors of the paper observed people for five years during their everyday life, and found subjects are more likely to contagiously yawn if they had a close social bond (e.g. a close friend or family member) with the yawner, or if they were a woman. The link between social bond and yawning is also observed in monkeys and apes.
The gender bias fits with research showing women are more likely to be empathetic than men, a characteristic important for social cohesion and caregiving.
Original research paper published in Royal Society Open Science on February 3, 2015.
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