People with psychopathic traits are less likely to “catch” a yawn than those who are more empathetic, at least according to a new study published in Personality and Individual Differences.
Psychopaths have a variety of characteristics—selfishness, manipulative drives, impulsiveness, fearlessness—but above all, a lack of empathy. Meanwhile, contagious yawning has long been associated with empathy and bonding, especially in social mammals like humans, chimpanzees, and dogs. Lead researcher Brian Rundle of Baylor University was the one who connected the two.
“You may yawn, even if you don’t have to,” he said in a press release. “We all know it and always wonder why. I thought, ‘If it’s true that yawning is related to empathy, I’ll bet that psychopaths yawn a lot less.’ So I put it to the test.”
Rundle and his team issued 135 college students a standard psychological test known as the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, which aims to determine their degree of cold-heartedness, fearless dominance, and self-centered impulsivity. “It’s not an ‘on/off’ of whether you’re a psychopath,” Rundle clarified. “It’s a spectrum.”
Following the administration of the test, the students were placed in a dim room in front of computers wearing noise-canceling headphones. Electrodes were placed on various parts of their faces and hands to quantitatively measure yawning. Then, they watched twenty 10-second snippets of facial movements including yawning and laughing.
The result: The less empathy a person had (and thus the more psychopathic they were), the less likely they were to yawn or exhibit muscle, nerve, and skin responses associated with empathy.
“The take-home lesson is not that if you yawn and someone else doesn’t, the other person is a psychopath,” Rundle adds. “A lot of people didn’t yawn, and we know that we’re not very likely to yawn in response to a stranger we don’t have empathetic connections with.
“But what we found tells us there is a neurological connection — some overlap — between psychopathy and contagious yawning. This is a good starting point to ask more questions.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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