Is yawning contagious?

The yawn reflex has long been observed to be contagious. In 1508, Erasmus wrote: "One man's yawning makes another yawn" and the French proverbialized the idea to "Un bon bâilleur en fait bâillier deux." ("One good gaper makes two others gape"). Often, if one person yawns, this may cause another person to "sympathetically" yawn. Observing another person's yawning face (especially his/her eyes), even reading, or thinking about yawning, or looking at a yawning picture can cause a person to yawn. Whether or not seeing someone else’s jaws gaping wide gives you the uncontrollable urge to join in may say more about your personality than you realize. Roughly half of people yawn when watching videos of others yawning. Some researchers hypothesize that contagious yawning is more common in people with greater empathy — the ability to recognize and share other people’s emotions — an idea that has gotten quite a bit of press lately. Developmental clues support the empathy theory for contagious yawns. Children younger than about four years old, it seems, yawn spontaneously but don’t catch contagious yawns from adults or from one another.