random thoughts of psychopaths and yawning

I was in the elevator after leaving class today and the guy next to me yawned. I yawned. That made me remember recently reading something about how yawning is linked to empathy and how instead of simply being a contagious phenomenon, the more empathy a person has, the more likely you are to yawn when someone else does. So my brain says: does that mean I could tell if someone is a sociopath if he doesn't yawn when I yawn? and then I kind of did one of those inner laughs that makes you smile and wish everyone could be inside your brain to they could see how amusing your random thoughts are. (not really, that would be really awful. I have a phobia of telepathy...the worst part is that I don't even believe in telepathy).
Anyways, as usual I decided to ask my pal mr. google. Here's a couple of cool articles:


This first one is from the TLC's website (um, yeah, TLC uses science. got a problem?). it's about a recent study done by Leeds university. They tried to find a correlation between the number of times a participant yawned after the assistant yawned and their results of an empathy test. The subject were 40 psychology students and 40 engineer students, so it's not like it's proof, but they found a convincing evidence. The subjects' with higher results on the empathy test definitely tended to yawn more when the assistant did. Go read it if you don't believe me. Or, read the BBC article about the same study, if you're not inclined to believe TLC. (um, why wouldn't you?)
This article takes it to the next level and found that chimps and dogs also yawn more with empathy. seriously. The dogs yawned more even if they only heard their owners yawn versus when hearing other people's and control sounds. Like I needed another reason to love puppies. However, lets be skeptical here, a positive correlation does not mean one necessarily causes the other. As the author says, "Still, it is unclear whether human-dog contagious yawning is the result of a complex process like empathy or a simpler process like social mimicry. Differences in experimental methodologies makes it particularly hard to make much sense of the differing findings." Well, yawn skeptics can continue being skeptical. I prefer to think my cat just loves me.


oh, and, since I know you're curious about it, "pandiculation" is the act of yawning and stretching simultaneously (thanks, wikipedia).