A news story about contagious yawning between species. Published in ScienceNOW, Science magazine's online portal for scientific discoveries: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/dogs-feel-your-pain.html

1. Dogs Feel Your Pain - ScienceNOW http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/dogs-feel-yo...
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Dogs Feel Your Pain
by Zuberoa Marcos on 7 May 2012, 4:32 PM | 20 Comments
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Yawn next to your dog, and she may do the same. Though it seems
ENL ARG E I M AG E
simple, this contagious behavior is actually quite remarkable: Only a few
animals do it, and only dogs cross the species barrier. Now a new study
finds that dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of us yawning,
the strongest evidence yet that canines may be able to empathize with us.
Besides people and dogs, contagious yawning has been observed in
gelada baboons, stump-tail macaques, and chimpanzees. Humans tend to
yawn more with friends and acquaintances, suggesting that "catching"
someone's yawn may be tied to feelings of empathy. Similarly, some
studies have found that dogs tend to yawn more after watching familiar
Open wide. Dogs yawn when they hear
people yawning. But it is unclear whether the canine behavior is linked to us yawn.
empathy as it is in people. One clue might be if even the mere sound of a Credit: Joyce Marrero/Shutterstock
human yawn elicited yawning in dogs.
To that end, scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 29 dogs, all of whom had lived for at least 6
months with their owners. To reduce anxiety, the study was performed in familiar rooms in the dogs' homes and in
the presence of a known person but with no visual contact with their owners.
The team, led by behavioral biologist Karine Silva, recorded yawning sounds of the dogs' owners and an unfamiliar
woman as well as an artificial control sound consisting of a computer-reversed yawn. (To help induce natural
yawning, volunteers listened to an audio loop of prerecorded yawns over headphones.) Each dog heard all of the
sounds in two sessions, each carried out 7 days apart. During the sessions, the researchers measured the number
of elicited yawns in dogs in response to sounds from known and unknown people.
As the team will report in the July issue of Animal Cognition, 12 out of 29 dogs yawned during the experiment. On
average, canines yawned five times more often when they heard humans they knew yawning as opposed to control
sounds. "These results suggest that dogs have the capacity to empathize with humans," says Silva.
That's not surprising, she says. People first began domesticating dogs at least 15,000 years ago, and since then
we've bred them to perform increasingly complex tasks, from hunting to guiding the blind. This close relationship
may have fostered cross-species empathy over the millennia. ScienceNOW. ISSN 1947-8062
"This study tells us something new about the mechanisms underlying contagious yawning in dogs," says Evan
McLean, a Ph.D. student at Duke University's Canine Cognition Center in Durham, North Carolina, who was not part
of the study. "As in humans, dogs can catch this behavior using their ears alone." Still, he notes, the experiments
don't tell us much about the nature of empathy in dogs. "Do they think about our emotions and internal states the
way we do as humans?"
Ádám Miklósi, an ethologist at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, agrees. "Using behaviors as indicators will
only show some similarity in behavior," he says, "but it will never tell us whether canine empathy, whatever this is,
matches human empathy." Previous work has shown, for example, that when dogs look guilty, they may not actually
be feeling guilty. "Dogs can simulate very well different forms of social interest that could mislead people to think
they are controlled by the same mental processes," says Miklósi, "but they may not always understand the
complexity of human behavior."
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2. Dogs Feel Your Pain - ScienceNOW http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/dogs-feel-yo...
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Peter Croft • 11 months ago
My dog, a 13 yo female Golden Labrador, is not a dog which seeks attention. She likes to
be stroked but usually is content to stay outside. She especially won't sleep in my bedroom with
me. Apart from during thunderstorms, she won't enter. Being so old, she has tumours and is
probably nearing the time when I'll have to take her on the last ride, and it's breaking me up.
A few months ago I was resting on my bed in the daytime and silently crying as I thought about
what I'll have to do. Tears were streaming, I can tell you. I heard her moving around and then she
came into my room and stood by my bed, looking for a cuddle. This is unheard of. She had never
done this before. I can only guess that she sensed my pain. I love that dog dearly.
4 • Reply • Share ›
Maria Luisa Sponga • 11 months ago
If you have ever had a dog in your home, you have no doubt that a dog feels empathy with
you.
2 • Reply • Share ›
Rosebud • a month ago
I've read that yawning is contagious, not for "socialization" reasons...but as an innate
survival instinct. Yawning is stimulated by a lower level of Oxygen, whether from low levels in our
environment, or simply because we are tired and breathing in a more shallow manner. When one
creature sees another creature yawn, a signal/ red flag is sent to our brains that alerts the brain to a
possible "problem' in the immediate area, ie) an inadequate supply of Oxygen. That, in turn, causes
the creature to yawn, which, essentially, is an exaggerated breath, causing the body to pull in more
Oxygen.
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Kitty Girl • 11 months ago
I have had two domesticated cats one male and one female. I was very close with the two
as they were inside pets. They both would yawn when I yawned and I noticed this. I would fake a
yawn being silent, and they would yawn. They didn't have to hear the yawn, they would only see it
sometimes. I would test them often and they yawned with a sound or without it didn't matter.
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Rogue Biologist • 11 months ago
Dogs have been shown to pay attention to human cues to a much greater extent than
wolves even mother-reared feral dogs, so I would not expect wolves to respond to human
behaviors in the same way as dogs. This could either be a result of selective breeding of dogs over
time, an initial trait that predisposed the dog's wild canid ancestor to be domesticated, or most
likely a combination of the two. Dogs also use yawns for different things than humans do, and a
dog will often yawn to indicated and diffuse tension (as Elnuar has already posted). It may be that
that was the consideration of your internal state that lead the authors to label this as empathy.
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edwin rutsch • 11 months ago
May I suggest a further resource to learn more about empathy and compassion.
The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
The Culture of Empathy website is the largest internet portal for resources and information about
the values of empathy and compassion. It contains articles, conferences, definitions, experts,
history, interviews, videos, science and much more about empathy and compassion.
http://CultureOfEmpathy.com
I posted a link to your article in our
Empathy and Compassion Magazine - Animals and Empathy Section
The latest news about empathy and compassion from around the world
http://bit.ly/dSXjfF
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JV • 11 months ago
OR, people and dogs simply pay more attention to voices/faces that are familiar to them,
and are therefore more likely to "catch" the yawn because they are paying attention and not
because they are "empathizing". More basic mechanisms are not as exciting, but probably usually
true. What in the world kind of role could empathy play in yawning anyway? This is ridiculous. Also,
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