Brief content: yawning is actually a physiological mechanism to remind people to stay awake, which can cool the brain, thereby improving the working efficiency of the brain, maintaining a awake state and good operating functions, and people who love yawning are more compassionate.
During the meeting, someone yawned, and then like a chain reaction, many people began to yawn. Are they tired of the meeting? Are they too tired? Maybe not at all. Two recent studies in the UK show that yawning is infectious and easy to be “infected” by others. People who yawn are generally more compassionate and highly consistent with the social environment around them. The study also found that although almost all animals yawn, yawning is only contagious in humans, chimpanzees and some monkeys.
Recently, at the annual scientific conference held in the UK, British scientists announced two research results related to yawning. Researchers have found that those who can’t help but open their mouths when they see others yawning are extremely prone to “empathic” reactions to other people’s emotions. When they notice that other people are yawning, they will involuntarily imitate other people’s actions.
Researchers also found that although almost all animals have yawning reactions, this reaction is only contagious among humans, chimpanzees and some monkeys. Moreover, infectious yawning is considered to be a way of social communication that animals learned in the process of evolution.
Dr. katriona Morrison, a scientist from the University of Leeds in the UK who led one of the studies, said that infectious yawning is closely related to “Empathy”. She found that those who were easy to sympathize with others were three times more likely to yawn than those with low social skills; This result indicates that yawning has obvious social function.
Forty psychology students and 40 engineering students participated in Dr. Morrison’s experiment. Psychology students are representatives of those who are good at “Empathy”, while engineering students are good at organizing and analyzing.
The results of the first experiment showed that the students of psychology department yawned an average of 5.5 times, while the students of Engineering Department yawned an average of 1.5 times. In the second experiment, the average score of the students of psychology department was 28, and the average score of the students of Engineering Department was 25.5.
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