What makes a person yawn after seeing someone else yawn?

Answer 1

It sounds weird, but I personally think that when you see someone yawn, its kind of like a mental thing to think tiredness. So you start thinking tired, and eventually yawn.
I'm no expert so don't like hold me to this. =)

I do know that if you hold open you're mouth for a long time, you eventually yawn. I have no clue why I just heard it somewhere. So you might want to ask that in another question haha.

Answer 2

yawn contagion is largely unconscious. Wherever it might affect the brain, it bypasses the known brain circuitry for consciously analyzing and mimicking other people’s actions.

This circuitry is called the “mirror-neuron system,” because it contains a special type of brain cells, or neurons, that become active both when their owner does something, and when he or she senses someone else doing the same thing.

Mirror neurons typically become active when a person consciously imitates an action of someone else, a process associated with learning. But they seem to play no role in yawn contagiousness, the researchers in the new study found. The cells are have no extra activity during contagious yawning compared with during other non-contagious facial movements, they observed.

Brain activity “associated with viewing another person yawn seems to circumvent the essential parts of the MNS [mirror neuron system], in line with the nature of contagious yawns as automatically released behavioural acts—rather than truly imitated motor patterns that would require detailed action understanding,” wrote the researchers, with the Helsinki University of Technology and the Research Centre Jülich, Germany. The findings are published in the February issue of the research journal Neuroimage.

But if seeing someone yawn doesn’t activate these centers, what does it do to the brain? The researchers found that it appears to strongly activate at least one brain area, called the superior temporal sulcus. But this activation was unrelated to any desire to yawn in response, so it may be irrelevant to the contagion question, the researchers added.

Possibly more significant, they wrote, was the apparent deactivation of a second brain area, called the left periamygdalar region. The more strongly a participant reported wanting to yawn in response to another person’s yawn, the stronger was this deactivation.

“This finding represents the first known neurophysiological signature of perceived yawn contagiousness,” the researchers wrote.

Exactly what the finding means is less clear, they acknowledged. The periamygdalar region is a zone that lies alongside the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain in the area of the side of the head. The periamygdalar region has been linked to the unconscious analysis of emotional expressions in faces. Why it would be deactivated in tandem with yawn contagion is unclear, the researchers said.

One thing seems clear from the study is that “contagious yawning does not rely on brain mechanisms of action understanding,” wrote one of the researchers, Riitta Hari of the Helsinki University of Technology, in a recent email. Rather, she continued, it seems to be an “‘automatically’ released (and most likely very archaic) motor pattern,” or sequence of physical actions.

In the study, volunteers looked at videos of actors yawning or making other mouth movements. Meanwhile their brains were scanned using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a system that shows the amount of activity or work going on in various brain areas based on the amount of oxygen being used up there. The volunteers were later asked how strongly they had been tempted to yawn while viewing the pictures.

Apart from the physical brain mechanisms of yawn contagiousness, researchers have offered different reasons as to why it exists. Some have proposed that in early humans, yawn contagiousness might have helped people communicate their alertness levels to each other, and thus coordinate their sleep schedules.

This might be part of a more general phenomenon of unconscious signals that serve to synchronize group behavior, the authors of the Neuroimage paper wrote. “Such synchronization could be essential for species survival and works without action understanding, like when a flock of birds rises to the air as soon as the first bird does so—supposably as it notices a predator.”

Answer 3

The yawn reflex is often described as contagious: if one person yawns, this will cause another person to "sympathetically" yawn.The proximate cause for contagious yawning may lie with mirror neurons, i.e. neurons in the frontal cortex of certain vertebrates, which upon being exposed to a stimulus from conspecific (same species) and occasionally interspecific organisms, activates the same regions in the brain. Mirror neurons have been proposed as a driving force for Imitation which lies at the root of much human learning, e.g. language acquisition. Yawning may be an offshoot of the same imitative impulse. At a distal level (in terms of evolutionary advantage), yawning might be a herd instinct.[5] Other theories suggest that the yawn serves to synchronize mood behavior among gregarious animals, similar to the howling of the wolf pack during a full moon. It signals tiredness to other members of the group in order to synchronize sleeping patterns and periods of activity. It can serve as a warning in displaying large, canine teeth. This phenomenon has been observed among various primates. The threat gesture is a way of maintaining order in the primates' social structure. The contagion of yawning is interspecific, for example a human yawning in front of a pet dog can incite the dog to yawn as well. Oddly, sometimes sympathetic yawning may be caused by simply looking at a picture of a person or animal yawning, or even seeing the word yawn

Answer 4

Although not fully understood, yawning appears to be not only a sign of tiredness but also a much more general sign of changing conditions within the body. Studies have shown that we yawn when we are fatigued, as well as when we are awakening, and during other times when the state of alertness is changing.
You are correct in thinking that yawns are catching. Seeing, hearing or thinking about yawning can trigger the event, but there is little understanding of why it is contagious. A number of theories regarding the genesis of yawning have been presented over the years. Some evidence suggests that yawning is a means of communicating changing environmental or internal body conditions to others. If so, then its contagious nature is most likely a means of communication within groups of animals, possibly as a means to synchronize behavior. If this is the case, yawning in humans is most likely vestigial and an evolutionarily ancient mechanism that has lost its significance.
Yawning is a stereotypical reflex characterized by a single deep inhalation (with the mouth open) and stretching of muscles of the jaw and trunk. It occurs in many animals, including humans, and involves interactions between the unconscious brain and the body, though the mechanism remains unclear. As for the etiology of yawning, for many years it was thought that yawns served to bring in more air because low oxygen levels were sensed in the lungs. We now know, however, that the lungs do not necessarily sense oxygen levels. Moreover, fetuses yawn in utero even though their lungs aren’t yet ventilated. In addition, different regions of the brain control yawning and breathing. Still, low oxygen levels in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus of the brain can induce yawning. Another hypothesis is that we yawn because we are tired or bored. But this, too, is probably not the case because the PVN also plays a role in penile erection, which is not typically an event associated with boredom.
It does appear that the PVN of the hypothalamus is, among other things, the "yawning center" of the brain. It contains a number of chemical messengers that can induce yawns, including dopamine, glycine, oxytocin and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). ACTH, for one, surges at night and prior to awakening, and induces yawning and stretching behavior in humans. The process of yawning also appears to require production of nitric oxide by specific neurons in the PVN. Once stimulated, the cells of the PVN activate cells of the brain stem and/or hippocampus, causing yawning to occur. Yawning likewise appears to have a feedback component: if you stifle or prevent a yawn, the process is somewhat unsatisfying. The stretching of jaw and face muscles seems to be necessary for a yawn to be satisfying.
More information is needed to fully understand the origin and meaning of the yawn. It may be that other parts of the brain are involved. Interestingly, although yawning is a normal function, why it occurs excessively in some patients with brain damage or with multiple sclerosis is unclear.

Answer 5

whilst somebody yawns after somebody else yawn its displaying human emotion. Yawning after somebody else yawn is a component of human emotion. Its perplexing for me to describe yet in reality it shows that the guy pertains to emotions of yet another.

Answer 6

When you yawn it equalizes pressure in your ear, that upsets the pressure in the other person's ear so they must yawn.

Answer 7

Just reading your question made me yawn. It's also kind of late.

Answer 8

What Makes A Person Yawn

Answer 9

I always wondered this also.

Answer 10

CHAIN REACTION !