Neuroscience
Have you ever noticed that yawning is so contagious it can spread round a room like a Mexican wave? Scientists still aren't in agreement as to why this happens but one idea is that the phenomenon depends on our capacity for empathy. This finds support in a new study showing for the first time that children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, in whom empathy is believed to be impaired, are immune to the contagious effects of yawning.
Twenty-four children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder - mostly boys aged between 7 and 15 years - and twenty-five age-matched non-autistic children, watched a series of 7-second videos showing people yawning. Control videos showed people opening their mouths but not yawning. Between each video, one-minute long silent cartoons kept the children's attention.
Footage of the children taken while they were watching the videos showed, as expected, that the non-autistic children yawned more during and after seeing a video of a person yawning, than after watching a control video. By contrast, the children with autism yawned no more after seeing a yawn video than after a control video – they appeared to be immune to the contagious effects of yawning. This remained true even after the researchers controlled for the effects of age and intelligence.
Past research has found that seeing the eye region of someone yawn is key to the yawn's contagious effects. So perhaps the fact that people with autism are known to focus more on the mouth region of people's faces, rather than the eyes, could partly explain the current findings.
Atsushi Senju and colleagues said their results “support the claim that contagious yawning and the capacity of empathy share common neural and cognitive mechanisms.” They added it would be interesting for future research to look at whether contagious yawning is impaired in other conditions in which empathy is compromised, such as psychopathy or frontal-temporal dementia.
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Senju, A., Maeda, M., Kikuchi, Y., Hasegawa, T., Tojo, Y. & Osanai, H. (In Press). Absence of contagious yawning in children with autistic spectrum disorder. Biological Letters.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to full-text pdf.
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Neuroscience
Children with autism are immune to contagious yawning
Have you ever noticed that yawning is so contagious it can spread round a room like a Mexican wave? Scientists still aren't in agreement as to why this happens but one idea is that the phenomenon depends on our capacity for empathy. This finds support in a new study showing for the first time that children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, in whom empathy is believed to be impaired, are immune to the contagious effects of yawning.Twenty-four children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder - mostly boys aged between 7 and 15 years - and twenty-five age-matched non-autistic children, watched a series of 7-second videos showing people yawning. Control videos showed people opening their mouths but not yawning. Between each video, one-minute long silent cartoons kept the children's attention.
Footage of the children taken while they were watching the videos showed, as expected, that the non-autistic children yawned more during and after seeing a video of a person yawning, than after watching a control video. By contrast, the children with autism yawned no more after seeing a yawn video than after a control video – they appeared to be immune to the contagious effects of yawning. This remained true even after the researchers controlled for the effects of age and intelligence.
Past research has found that seeing the eye region of someone yawn is key to the yawn's contagious effects. So perhaps the fact that people with autism are known to focus more on the mouth region of people's faces, rather than the eyes, could partly explain the current findings.
Atsushi Senju and colleagues said their results “support the claim that contagious yawning and the capacity of empathy share common neural and cognitive mechanisms.” They added it would be interesting for future research to look at whether contagious yawning is impaired in other conditions in which empathy is compromised, such as psychopathy or frontal-temporal dementia.
_________________________________
Senju, A., Maeda, M., Kikuchi, Y., Hasegawa, T., Tojo, Y. & Osanai, H. (In Press). Absence of contagious yawning in children with autistic spectrum disorder. Biological Letters.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to full-text pdf.
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Young children with autism have difficultly deliberately deceiving other people, now a new study has shown that they are also more trusting than their neurotypical peers. These two characteristics may be related to the same underlying cause - namely,...
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This post is for students and teachers following the AQA spec B, 2008 specification for psychology. It provides a selection of links to material from the Research Digest blog and The Psychologist magazine (marked with a 'P') that ties in with...
- Children See Obesity As Contagious
Young children see obesity as if it were a kind of contagious illness. That's according to Paul Klaczynski who says his research helps explain why the stigmatisation of fat people is so prevalent, and why obesity prejudice is committed by children...
- The Way Children With Autism Draw People
Drawings of humans by children with autism tend to lack variety, researchers have found, possibly reflecting the unusual way they think about and relate to other people. Anthony Lee and Peter Hobson compared drawings by 14 autistic children (aged 8 to...
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