Smell facilitates auditory contagious yawning in stranger rats
| Autor: | Jaime Valencia, Alejandro Moyaho, Araceli Ugarte, Xaman Rivas-Zamudio, Jose R. Eguibar |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: |
Male
biology Relaxation (psychology) media_common.quotation_subject Mental state attribution Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Emotional contagion Empathy Imitative Behavior Developmental psychology Yawn Rats Rats Sprague-Dawley Smell biology.animal medicine Animals Primate Yawning medicine.symptom Reactivity (psychology) Psychology Sensory cue Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics media_common |
| Zdroj: | Animal cognition. 18(1) |
| ISSN: | 1435-9456 |
| Popis: | Most vertebrates yawn in situations ranging from relaxation to tension, but only humans and other primate species that show mental state attribution skills have been convincingly shown to display yawn contagion. Whether complex forms of empathy are necessary for yawn contagion to occur is still unclear. As empathy is a phylogenetically continuous trait, simple forms of empathy, such as emotional contagion, might be sufficient for non-primate species to show contagious yawning. In this study, we exposed pairs of male rats, which were selected for high yawning, with each other through a perforated wall and found that olfactory cues stimulated yawning, whereas visual cues inhibited it. Unexpectedly, cage-mate rats failed to show yawn contagion, although they did show correlated emotional reactivity. In contrast, stranger rats showed auditory contagious yawning and greater rates of smell-facilitated auditory contagious yawning, although they did not show correlated emotional reactivity. Strikingly, they did not show contagious yawning to rats from a low-yawning strain. These findings indicate that contagious yawning may be a widespread trait amongst vertebrates and that mechanisms other than empathy may be involved. We suggest that a communicatory function of yawning may be the mechanism responsible for yawn contagion in rats, as contagiousness was strain-specific and increased with olfactory cues, which are involved in mutual recognition. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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