ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Contagious yawning is not a signal of empathy: no evidence of familiarity, gender or prosociality biases in dogs.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Contagious yawning is stronger in wolves than in dog-admixed wolves.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Yawning in sync: implications for social cohesion in horses.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Yawn Contagion and Modality-Matching in the Female-Bonded Society of Geladas (Theropithecus gelada).American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Beware of Strangers: Dogs' Empathetic Response to Unknown Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Behavioural Synchronisation between Dogs and Humans: Unveiling Interspecific Motor Resonance?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- The Role of Empathic Concern and Gender on Interspecific Contagious Yawning in Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Interspecific Contagious Yawning in Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Familiarity modulates both intra- and interspecific yawn contagion in red-capped mangabeys.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Yawn contagion in bonobos: Another group, another story.American journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Not all yawns tell the same story: The case of Tonkean macaques.American journal of primatology · 2021Article
- Yawning Is More Contagious in Pregnant Than Nulliparous Women : Naturalistic and Experimental Evidence.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Experimental evidence for yawn contagion in orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus).Scientific reports · 2020Article
- One thousand yawns.Primates; journal of primatology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Contagious yawning has been suggested to be a potential signal of empathy in non-human animals. However, few studies have been able to robustly test this claim. Here, we ran a Bayesian multilevel reanalysis of six studies of contagious yawning in dogs. This provided robust support for claims that contagious yawning is present in dogs, but found no evidence that dogs display either a familiarity or gender bias in contagious yawning, two predictions made by the contagious yawning-empathy hypothesis. Furthermore, in an experiment testing the prosociality bias, a novel prediction of the contagious yawning-empathy hypothesis, dogs did not yawn more in response to a prosocial demonstrator than to an antisocial demonstrator. As such, these strands of evidence suggest that contagious yawning, although present in dogs, is not mediated by empathetic mechanisms. This calls into question claims that contagious yawning is a signal of empathy in mammals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.