ArticleFrontiers in veterinary science2020
Contagious Yawning in African Elephants
Article in Frontiers in veterinary science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contagious yawning is stronger in wolves than in dog-admixed wolves.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Chimpanzees yawn when observing an android yawn.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Yawning in sync: implications for social cohesion in horses.Current zoology · 2025Article
- The Role of Empathic Concern and Gender on Interspecific Contagious Yawning in Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- How video calls affect mimicry and trust during interactions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Interspecific Contagious Yawning in Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- No Evidence for Contagious Yawning in Juvenile Ravens (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- One thousand yawns.Primates; journal of primatology · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While spontaneous yawning is common across all vertebrate classes, contagious yawning is less common and has been observed only in a few species of social animals. Interspecific contagious yawning in response to yawning by humans has been observed only by chimpanzees and dogs. After confirming additional occurrences of intraspecific contagious yawning in a group of captive African elephants previously studied, we further investigated the potential for the same group of elephants to engage in interspecific contagious yawning with familiar human handlers. Ten captive African elephants, most of whom had been previously studied, were observed over 13 nights for evidence of intraspecific contagious yawning. Seven of these elephants were also involved in trials where familiar handlers performed staged yawns, as well as trials with staged non-yawning gapes, or trials with no yawns or gapes. Incorporating previously collected contagious yawning data, we describe nine instances of intraspecific contagious yawning in the elephants. Three of the seven elephants yawned contagiously in response to humans during the interspecific yawning trials. This is the first report of interspecific contagious yawning by elephants in response to yawns by familiar humans.
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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.