She more than he: gender bias supports the empathic nature of yawn contagion in Homo sapiens.

ABSTRACT: Psychological, clinical and neurobiological findings endorse that empathic abilities are more developed in women than in men. Because there is growing evidence that yawn contagion is an empathy-based phenomenon, we expect that the female bias in the empathic abilities reflects on a gender skew in the responsiveness to others' yawns. We verified this assumption by applying a linear model on a dataset gathered during a 5 year period of naturalistic observations on humans. Gender, age and social bond were included in the analysis as fixed factors. The social bond and the receiver's gender remained in the best model. The rates of contagion were significantly lower between acquaintances than between friends and family members, and significantly higher in women than in men. These results not onl

SUBMITTER: Norscia I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4785969 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature