Earlier than previously thought: yawn contagion in preschool children. Developmental Psychobiology

Yawning is a primitive and stereotyped motor action involving oro-facial, laryngeal, pharyngeal, thoracic, and abdominal muscles. Contagious yawning, an involuntarily action induced by viewing or listening to others’ yawns, has been demonstrated in human and several non-human species. Previous studies with humans showed that infants and preschool children, socially separated during video-experiments, were not infected by others’ yawns. Here, we tested the occurrence of yawn contagion in 129 preschool children (ranging from 2.5 to 5.5 years) belonging to five different classes by video-recording them in their classrooms during the ordinary school activities. As it occurs in adult humans, children of all ages were infected by others’ yawns within the two minutes after the perception of the stimulus. The yawn contagion occurred earlier than previously thought. For children, it appears that the natural social setting is more conducive to yawn contagion than the inherently artificial experimental approach. Moreover, children's gender did not affect the level of contagious yawning. The neural, emotional, and behavioural traits of preschool children are probably not sufficiently mature to express variability between boys and girls; nevertheless, children appeared to be already well-equipped with the "neural toolkit" necessary for expressing yawn contagion.