Natural History Museum, University of Pisa, Calci Pisa, Italy.
Unit of Ethology, Department of Biology, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
Dev Psychobiol. 2021 Jul;63(5):931-944. doi: 10.1002/dev.22094. Epub 2021 Jan 27.
Yawning is a primitive and stereotyped motor action involving orofacial, 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 2 min 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.
打哈欠是一种涉及面肌、喉肌、咽肌、胸腹肌和腹肌的原始和刻板的运动动作。传染性打哈欠是一种由观看或听到他人打哈欠引起的无意识动作，已在人类和几种非人类物种中得到证实。先前的人类研究表明，在视频实验中被社会隔离的婴儿和学龄前儿童不会受到他人打哈欠的感染。在这里，我们通过视频记录他们在教室中的日常活动，测试了 129 名来自五个不同班级的学龄前儿童（年龄在 2.5 到 5.5 岁之间）的打哈欠传染性。与成人一样，所有年龄段的儿童在感知刺激后的 2 分钟内都会受到他人打哈欠的感染。打哈欠的传染性比之前认为的要早。对于儿童来说，自然的社交环境似乎比固有的人为实验方法更有利于打哈欠的传染。此外，儿童的性别并不影响传染性打哈欠的程度。学龄前儿童的神经、情绪和行为特征可能还不够成熟，无法表现出男孩和女孩之间的差异；然而，儿童似乎已经具备了表达打哈欠传染性所需的“神经工具包”。
