ArticleAnimal cognition2021
Seeing others yawn selectively enhances vigilance: an eye-tracking study of snake detection.
Article in Animal cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Social engagement modulates wild monkeys' vocal expressions and the behavioral response to that of others.iScience · 2026Article
- Article
- Behavioral Contagion in Wild Ecuadorian White-Fronted Capuchins (Cebus aequatorialis).American journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Fetal yawning and mouth openings: Frequency, developmental trends, and association with birth weight.PloS one · 2026Article
- Inertia and Rapid Divergence in the Evolution of Yawning: A Comparison Between Two Closely Related but Socially Different Monkeys.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Diving back two hundred million years: yawn contagion in fish.Communications biology · 2025Article
- 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
- Moving spiders do not boost visual search in spider fear.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- More than a simple fixed action pattern: Yawning in drills.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- The Role of Empathic Concern and Gender on Interspecific Contagious Yawning in Humans.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Pareidolic faces receive prioritized attention in the dot-probe task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- The evidence does not support long-term oxygenation as a functional explanation for the evolution of yawning.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 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
- No Evidence for Contagious Yawning in Juvenile Ravens (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Two forms of yawning modulation in three months old infants during the Face to Face Still Face paradigm.PloS one · 2022Article
- People that score high on psychopathic traits are less likely to yawn contagiously.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Bridging Captive and Wild Studies: Behavioral Plasticity and Social Complexity inAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While the origin of yawning appears to be physiologic, yawns may also hold a derived communicative function in social species. In particular, the arousal reduction hypothesis states that yawning signals to others that the actor is experiencing a down regulation of arousal and vigilance. If true, seeing another individual yawn might enhance the vigilance of observers to compensate for the reduced mental processing of the yawner. This was tested in humans by assessing how exposure to yawning stimuli alters performance on visual search tasks for detecting snakes (a threatening stimulus) and frogs (a neutral stimulus). In a repeated-measures design, 38 participants completed these tasks separately after viewing yawning and control videos. Eye-tracking was used to measure detection latency and distractor fixation frequency. Replicating previous evolutionary-based research, snakes were detected more rapidly than frogs across trials. Moreover, consistent with the view that yawning holds a distinct signaling function, there were significant interactions for both detection latency and distractor fixation frequency showing that vigilance was selectively enhanced following exposure to yawns. That is, after viewing videos of other people yawning, participants detected snakes more rapidly and were less likely to fixate on distractor frogs during trials. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for a social function to yawning in any species, and imply the presence of a previously unidentified psychological adaptation for preserving group vigilance.
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