Berlin: A study proved that a person’s emotional closeness to someone is a decisive factor in unintentional imitation of that person, which makes yawning more contagious among family members, then between friends, then acquaintances, and then between strangers.

The research, published by the American magazine “Plus One”, indicates that empathy, that is, the ability to recognize the feelings of others and issue a reaction to them, is a crucial element in the formation of social behavior.

Some researchers believe that what is known as mirror neurons, which exist in the form of a network of neurons, makes us respond automatically to the smile of others.

The researchers say that contagious yawning is not a new matter for scientists, as they have been suggesting for a long time that there are such forms of emotional empathy for others, but it has not been proven in this way until now.

Over the course of a year, the researchers observed the behavior of 109 people from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, and then analyzed their behavior in 480 experiments, including the angle at which the observer sees the beginnings of yawning.

They always reached the same conclusion, which is that the social relationship was each time the most decisive factor in the transmission of yawning infection, followed by the gender factor (male or female), then the nationality or the conditions of the situation itself.

The researchers noted that yawning is transmitted more quickly between people who are related, but the element of imitation plays its role only when emotional empathy is already apparent in the person who is being yawned, but this element does not play a role in young children or people with autism.