Smell facilitates auditory contagious yawning in stranger rats

Most vertebrates yawn in situations ranging from relaxation to tension, but only humans and other primate species that show mental state attribution skills have been convincingly shown to display yawn contagion. Whether complex forms of empathy are necessary for yawn contagion to occur is still uncl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Animal cognition 2015-01, Vol.18 (1), p.279-290
Main Authors: Moyaho, Alejandro, Rivas-Zamudio, Xaman, Ugarte, Araceli, Eguibar, José R., Valencia, Jaime
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Animals
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Empathy
Imitative Behavior
Life Sciences
Male
Original Paper
Primates
Psychology Research
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Rodents
Smell
Vertebrates
Yawning
Zoology
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Summary:Most vertebrates yawn in situations ranging from relaxation to tension, but only humans and other primate species that show mental state attribution skills have been convincingly shown to display yawn contagion. Whether complex forms of empathy are necessary for yawn contagion to occur is still unclear. As empathy is a phylogenetically continuous trait, simple forms of empathy, such as emotional contagion, might be sufficient for non-primate species to show contagious yawning. In this study, we exposed pairs of male rats, which were selected for high yawning, with each other through a perforated wall and found that olfactory cues stimulated yawning, whereas visual cues inhibited it. Unexpectedly, cage-mate rats failed to show yawn contagion, although they did show correlated emotional reactivity. In contrast, stranger rats showed auditory contagious yawning and greater rates of smell-facilitated auditory contagious yawning, although they did not show correlated emotional reactivity. Strikingly, they did not show contagious yawning to rats from a low-yawning strain. These findings indicate that contagious yawning may be a widespread trait amongst vertebrates and that mechanisms other than empathy may be involved. We suggest that a communicatory function of yawning may be the mechanism responsible for yawn contagion in rats, as contagiousness was strain-specific and increased with olfactory cues, which are involved in mutual recognition.
ISSN:1435-9448
1435-9456
DOI:10.1007/s10071-014-0798-0