Question
I believe I may have caught multiple yawns from my dog. Is this possible?
Can yawning be transmitted across species from pets? The setting could be a couch in the living room, for example.
Answer
Yes! There have been several studies between dogs and humans for contagious yawning. Yawning is also a way for dogs to show stress.
Contagious yawning has also been seen in certain species of apes (i.e Bonobos, chimpanzees).
From PLOS:
The first study investigating contagious yawning in dogs showed that a high proportion of the subjects (72%) yawned after observing a human experimenter acting a yawn [22]. The authors argued that since dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative signals [27] there is the potential that dogs may also have developed the capacity for empathy towards humans, and thus being able to catch human yawns.
From the Biology Letters:
The yawning condition elicited yawns for 21 out of 29 dogs (one example is shown in figure 1), and no dogs yawned in the control condition (p<.001, McNemar's test; McNemar 1947). No yawns were observed during the interval between conditions either. On average, dogs yawned 1.9 times in the yawning condition (range, 0–5; see the electronic supplementary material, table). On average, it took 1 min 39 s for the dogs to yawn (s.d., 1 min 28 s; range, 5 s to 4 min 47 s), after the experimenter had presented 4.5 yawns (s.d., 4.4; range, 1–17).
A summary of the studies can be found at animalcogniton.org.
Answered By - Rebecca RVT