The post Why Yawning Is Contagious Even Between Dogs and People first appeared on Crafting Your Home.
Anyone who’s yawned within seconds of their dog doing the same thing has wondered if it was a coincidence. Researchers have been testing that exact question since 2008, and the findings turn out to be more contested and more interesting than a simple “yes.”
The Study That Started It
In 2008, researchers at the University of London, led by psychologist Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, ran the first controlled test of whether dogs catch human yawns. Twenty-nine dogs watched a person either yawn repeatedly or make a similar but non-yawning mouth movement. Twenty-one of the 29 dogs (72%) yawned after watching the person yawn. None yawned during the control condition. It was the first evidence that contagious yawning could cross the species line between humans and non-primate.
The Empathy Hypothesis and Its Skeptics
The 2008 team proposed that dogs’ susceptibility to human yawns might reflect a capacity for empathy, since dogs are unusually attuned to human social cues. A 2013 study published in PLOS ONE tested this more directly by comparing how dogs responded to yawns from their owner versus a stranger, and found dogs yawned significantly more often at familiar people. This pattern mirrors how empathy operates in humans, who also tend to “catch” yawns more readily from people they’re close to.
But the picture isn’t settled. Attempts to replicate the original 2008 findings have produced mixed results: a 2009 study failed to reproduce the effect, and a 2010 study found only weak evidence. A 2020 re-analysis of six existing dog studies found no consistent evidence that familiarity or the dog’s sex predicted contagious yawning, directly contradicting the empathy-based explanation. Researchers in this field generally agree dogs can catch human yawns; they disagree on why.
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It May Not Require Seeing a Yawn at All
A 2012 study pushed the question further by testing whether dogs need to see a yawn or whether just hearing one is enough. Researchers played dogs with audio recordings of yawns with no visual cues. They still yawned in response and yawned more at familiar voices than unfamiliar ones. This supported the idea that the effect is genuinely triggered by something about the yawn itself, rather than dogs simply copying a mouth movement they watched.
The Mechanism in Humans Is Still Debated
Even in people, scientists don’t fully agree on what causes contagious yawning. The leading candidate is the mirror neuron system, brain cells that activate both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it. Brain-imaging studies have found that watching someone yawn activates regions associated with imitation and social processing. But researchers caution that this connection remains circumstantial: some EEG and fMRI studies have failed to find clear activity in classic mirror-neuron regions during contagious yawning, so the mirror-neuron explanation, while popular, isn’t proven.
What is well established is timing: contagious yawning doesn’t show up in young children until around age four or five, the same developmental window in which “theory of mind” the ability to understand that other people have separate thoughts and feelings begins to emerge. That overlap is one of the stronger pieces of evidence of tying yawn contagion to social cognition rather than pure reflex.
Empathy Isn’t the Whole Story, Even in People
Empathy doesn’t explain everything. One of the largest individual-differences studies on the topic, involving 328 adults, found that empathy scores barely predicted who caught yawns from others; age was a far stronger factor, and even age only accounted for a small fraction of the variation between people. That finding complicates the tidy “yawning equals empathy” narrative that’s become popular shorthand for both humans and the dogs who yawn back at us.
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The Bottom Line
Dogs really do catch human yawns at rates comparable to, or higher than, contagious yawning between humans. What’s driving it social bonding and empathy, a more basic contagion mechanism, or some combination is still being worked out, and researchers are honest that the evidence doesn’t point cleanly in one direction yet.
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