Why do we yawn? The importance of evidence for specific yawn-induced effects

Guggisberg, Adrian; Mathis, Johannes; Schnider, Armin; Hess, Christian W

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.12.004

Scientific article

Letter

English

Why do we yawn? The importance of evidence for specific yawn-induced effects

Contributors

Guggisberg, Adrian

; Mathis, Johannes; Schnider, Armin; Hess, Christian W

Published in

Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, vol. 35, no. 5, p. 1302-1304

Publication date

2011

Abstract

Gallup (this issue) believes that our recent review on the function of yawning (Guggisberg et al., 2010) is unbalanced and that it ignores evidence for his thermoregulation hypothesis. Here we address these criticisms and show them to be untenable. While we never claimed that the social hypothesis of yawning has "definite experimental support", we emphasize the importance of experimental evidence for specific effects of yawns when considering why we yawn. The only specific effect of yawning that could be demonstrated so far is its contagiousness in humans, some non-human primates, and possibly dogs, whereas all studies investigating physiological consequences of yawns were unable to observe specific yawn-induced effects in the individual of any species. The argument that from an evolutionary perspective, yawns must have a "primitive" physiological function arises from imprecise reasoning.

Keywords

Animals
Dogs
Humans
Imitative Behavior/physiology
Social Behavior
Yawning/physiology

UNIGE affiliation entities

Faculté de médecine / Section de médecine clinique / Département des neurosciences cliniques

UNIGE research groups

Funding

Swiss National Science Foundation - Neural Correlates of Functional Deficits and Recovery in Patients with Focal or Diffuse Brain Disease [129679]

Citation (ISO format)

GUGGISBERG, Adrian et al. Why do we yawn? The importance of evidence for specific yawn-induced effects. In: Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2011, vol. 35, n° 5, p. 1302–1304. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.12.004

Article (Published version)

Article (Accepted version)

Identifiers

PID : unige:24765
DOI : 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.12.004
PMID : 21168437

Journal ISSN

0149-7634

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Why do we yawn? The importance of evidence for specific yawn-induced effects

Contributors

Published in

Publication date

Abstract

Keywords

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Funding

Citation (ISO format)

Main files (2)

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

Technical informations

Creation

First validation

Update

Status update

Last indexation