Abstract
It has been theorized that the contagion of behaviors may be related to social cognitive abilities, but empirical findings are inconsistent. We recorded young adults’ behavioral expression of contagious yawning and contagious smiling to video stimuli and employed a multi-method assessment of sociocognitive abilities including self-reported internal experience of emotional contagion, self-reported trait empathy, accuracy on a theory of mind task, and observed helping behavior. Results revealed that contagious yawners reported increases in tiredness from pre- to post-video stimuli exposure, providing support for the internal experience of emotional contagion, and were more likely to provide help to the experimenter relative to non-contagious yawners. Contagious smilers showed stably high levels of self-reported happiness from pre- to post-video exposure, were more likely to provide help to the experimenter, and had increased accuracy on a theory of mind task relative to non-contagious smilers. There were no differences in self-reported trait empathy for contagious versus non-contagious yawners or smilers. Contagious yawning may be related to some basic (i.e., emotional contagion) and advanced (i.e., helping behavior) sociocognitive processes, whereas contagious smiling is related to some advanced sociocognitive processes (i.e., theory of mind and helping behavior).
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Data Availability
The de-identified data, syntax, and supporting materials for the analyses reported here can be found at https://osf.io/sbgn9. This study was not preregistered.
Notes
We hypothesized that participants would be most likely to perceive the internal state of a yawning person as feeling tired. However, because yawning is a response that may also occur due to an internal state of stress or anxiety to facilitate arousal or alertness, we performed post-hoc analyses to examine the effect of contagion group on self-reported anxiousness from pre- to post-video using a repeated-measures ANOVA, and this effect was not statistically significant, F1, 151 = 1.32, p = .25, suggesting specificity to self-reported tiredness in the current study.
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Acknowledgements
This writing of this paper was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to KLP and a SSHRC Insight Grant to HAH. The authors wish to thank Jillian Rioux and Nicole Liu for their assistance with data collection and behavioral coding, as well as the participants for completing the study. The first author is now at Brock University.
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KLP was responsible for conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, project administration, visualization, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing; HAH was responsible for conceptualization, funding acquisition, supervision, writing – review & editing.
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Poole, K.L., Henderson, H.A. Social Cognitive Correlates of Contagious Yawning and Smiling. Hum Nat 34, 569–587 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-023-09463-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-023-09463-1