What Is Contagious Yawning?

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CHAPTER 1
Background of Study
When people see other people yawning, that person will be yawning too. Does human realise about this situation? Sometimes, people yawning not because they felt sleepy, but they just being influenced by other’s that they currently see them yawned (Giganti & Zilli, 2010). This situation is called as contagious yawning. Contagious yawning means that when people’s yawn, it will automatically transfer it to other people that see them yawn and make that people yawn too (Yoon & Tennie, 2010). Contagious yawning happened because a human has the ability to mimic the other people's behaviour. Mirror neurons in the human brain has the ability to copy what others are currently doing(Keysers, 2007). This revealed that, human can mimic the other human behaviour.
During human and human interaction, they automatically mimic their interaction partner such as in speech accent, posture, gesture and mannerism (Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng, & Chartrand, 2003). This is proved by several researched that already conducted. During treatment periods on psychotherapy session, the patient will copy the posture of therapist (Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2008). This research showed that patient mimicked therapist. Other research conduct towards woman on eating shown that, between eating companions, another person mimicked their eating companion by taking a byte at the same time as their eating companion (Hermans et al., 2012). Here shown mimicry can change action of people.
Human behavior on eating differs from one person to another in the way they consume their food. The eating speed of a person can be one of the important aspects of eating behavior. Time constraint might be one of the factors that influence eating speed. People ten...

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