Dogs also yawn to people

Seeing someone yawning often makes us yawn. A new study has shown that our four-legged friends can yawn after us too.

According to the researchers, the results show that domestic dogs may have a basic form of empathy.

This phenomenon, called contagious yawning, has only been discovered in humans and some other primates such as chimpanzees. It is considered to be related to empathy with the same type. Past studies have also investigated yawning in a species, such as a chimp that stimulates other chimpanzees to yawn or humans also cause yawning in others.

Four-legged team

Researcher Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London for the first time experimented with this phenomenon in his Labrador retriever. As soon as he yawned, the dog yawned immediately afterwards. And surely if you verify with other dogs, the same results are also available.

The new study involved dogs of various breeds from Greyhound rabbit breeds to Staffordshire Bull Terrier hybrid dogs and Dalmatian dogs. A total of 29 dogs conducted two different experiments, each lasting 5 minutes. The first experiment is as follows: a person (not the owner) calls the dog closer; While maintaining eye contact with him, he will perform yawning with sound.

In the second experiment, a person also performed the same actions except that the person did not yawn making a sound, but just opened his mouth and closed it again.

The Hungarian dog Vizsla may be really sleepy or he is just "spy" on the yawn of the owner.(Photo: Dreamstime.com)

During the two processes, 21 dogs (accounting for 72%) yawned , while no dog yawned in the second experiment. Compared to 45% to 65% of the findings in previous studies in humans and 33% in chimpanzee studies.

In addition to yawning, the dogs showed a similar reaction to the yawning of humans. Joly-Mascheroni said: 'While yawning, we found that the dogs responded quite similar to us. They all perform yawning by dropping their ears or turning their heads. '

'Tired' message

Researchers are still sure why dogs yawn with us. In fact, they still do not understand the phenomenon of contagious yawning in humans.

Joly-Mascheroni replied to LiveScience: 'There are some theories that we have conveyed' I'm tired 'information by yawning since we haven't used language yet.'

Accordingly, humans can transmit sleepy messages to dogs. He added: 'It is interesting to find out what other information we bring to dogs or to any other animal we do not know.'

In previous studies, Atsushi Senji of the University of London has shown that there may be an existence between empathy and contagious yawning in autistic children. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, autism is a developmental disorder in which infected people often show weakness in social interaction, communication problems and lack of communication. empathy. According to Senji, previous research has shown that autistic children do not yawn to others.

New findings in dogs are published online in the August issue of Biology Letters. The results have proved that human's best friend also has empathy at a basic level.