Psychology researchers in the UK had been busy demonstrating that their students are better than students from rival faculties. By spying on psychology and engineering students in a waiting room they found the former were better able to identify other people’s emotional states and were also better at picking up yawns – well known to be contagious. “They have got a more highly developed social awareness,” said study leader Catriona Morrison (Guardian, story also features in the Times).

While waiting for what they believed would be the experiment 40 students of each type were secretly monitored while someone in the room yawned 10 times. The psychology students yawned an average of 5.5 times, while engineers yawned 1.5 times. On a subsequent test assessing empathy psychologists scored 28 and engineers 25.5. “We thought that psychology students would be highly empathetic and that engineering students would be more systemised, more interested in numbers and formulas,” Morison told the BBC. Having spent many an hour trying to tell people the cliché of socially inept scientists is a nonsense I’m quite annoyed she was proven right.

This is the second story on the contagious nature of yawning in the last month. Researchers have also linked an inability to ‘contract’ yawns to autism (Nature, subscription required). So clearly the research topic is catching too.

Now if someone could just work out why on earth we actually yawn in the first place we might be getting somewhere…

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