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- Echokinetic
yawning, theory of mind, and
empathy
- ABSTRACT
-
- Psychopathy is characterized by a general
antisocial lifestyle with behaviors including
being selfish, manipulative, impulsive,
fearless, callous, possibly domineering, and
particularly lacking in empathy. Contagious
yawning in our species has been strongly linked
to empathy. We exposed 135 students, male and
female, who completed the Psychopathic
Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R), to a
yawning paradigm intended to induce a
reactionary yawn. Further, we exposed males to
an emotion-related startle paradigm meant to
assess peripheral amygdalar reactivity. We found
that scores on the PPI-R subscale
Coldheartedness significantly predicted a
reduced chance of yawning. Further, we found
that emotion-related startle amplitudes were
predictive of frequency of contagious yawning.
These data suggest that psychopathic traits may
be related to the empathic nature of contagious
yawning in our species.
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- 1. Yawning and psychopathy
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- Yawning is a stereotyped behavior that, in
our evolutionary history, has clear, deep roots
as evidenced by its proliferation in mammals as
well as many other vertebrates (Argiolas and
Melis, 1998; Lehmann, 1979). It is clearly
characterized by long inspiration followed by a
shorter expiration (Argiolas and Melis, 1998).
While literature concerning the pharmacology and
functional anatomy of yawning is not lacking
(Argiolas and Melis, 1998; Guggisberg, Mathis,
Schnider, and Hess, 2010; Nahab, Hattori, Saad,
and Hallett, 2009), the primary facet of yawning
of interest is the phenomena of contagious
yawns, specifically within the context of
psychopathology.
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- Contagious yawns, which are spurred by yawn,
thinking, hearing, reading, or observing another
conspecific (or other species), have been linked
to empathy (Lehmann, 1979; Platek, Critton,
Myers, and Gallup, 2003; Platek, Mohamed, and
Gallup, 2005). They are even documented in other
familiar animals such as Pan Troglodytes and
Canis Familiaris and have been linked to empathy
(Campbell and de Waal, 2011; Romero, Konno, and
Hasegawa, 2013). The anatomy and pharmacology of
yawning and its contagious nature are beginning
to be investigated, with oxytocin playing a
large role as well as the posterior cingulate
cortex (PCC), precuneus, bilateral thalamus, and
parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) (Platek et al.,
2005; Sanna, Argiolas, and Melis, 2012).
Interestingly, Schurmann et al. (2005) found
that the mirror-neuron system is not directly
activated in contagious yawning, suggesting that
the action is automatic and not imitated.
Norscia and Palagi (2011) found that people show
a large susceptibility to contagious yawns when
elicited by a related individual in terms of
occurrence and frequency of yawns. For
strangers, they found that people show a marked
latency period of contagious yawns, strongly
suggesting a component of familiarity involved
with the contagion. Variations in susceptibility
to contagious yawning are already known to occur
in certain populations. Age is known to affect
the likelihood of contagious yawning; as age
increases, contagious yawning decreases
(Bartholomew and Cirulli, 2014). Further,
children on the autism spectrum are less likely
to demonstrate contagious yawning (Giganti and
Esposito Ziello, 2009; Senju et al., 2007),
which is speculated to have a strong
relationship to the empathetic deficits seen in
this population.
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- 1.1. Psychopathy
-
- Empirical support for yawning having its
evolutionary roots in empathic behavior is
growing (Campbell and de Waal, 2011).
Psychopathic traits, then, become a curious
angle in which to view contagious yawning in our
species. Psychopathy is characterized by a
general antisocial lifestyle including being
selfish, manipulative, impulsive, fearless,
callous, domineering, and particularly lacking
in empathy (Hare, 2003; Weber, Habel, Amunts,
and Schneider, 2008). The disorder is typically
assessed via the Psychopathic Check List-Revised
(PCL-R) developed by Hare (2003) or the
Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI-R)
developed by Lilienfeld and Widows (2005).
Psychopathy and its close relative Antisocial
Personality Disorder are found overwhelmingly in
males (Cale and Lilienfeld, 2002). Additionally,
psychopathy carries specific brain abnormalities
including structural and functional impairments
of the orbitofrontal-ventromedial prefrontal
cortex as well as the amygdala (Gao, Glenn,
Schug, Yang, and Raine, 2009; Weber et al.,
2008).
-
- The PPI-R operationalizes two discrete
components within psychop-athy: a primary
(affective) and secondary (behavioral) facet
(Hare, 2003; Lilienfeld and Widows, 2005), where
the primary facet encom-passes features
including cruelty, lack of affect and empathy,
while the secondary facet encompasses features
such as impulsivity and aggres-sion. Psychopaths
demonstrate an overall small but marked decrease
in the ability to recognize emotion in others
(Kosson, Suchy, Mayer, and Libby, 2002; Wilson,
Juodis, and Porter, 2011), which is also
associated with decreased amygdalar function,
particularly with fearful faces (Jones, Laurens,
Herba, Barker, and Viding, 2009). Kosson et al.
(2002) showed a slight overall decreased ability
to rec-ognize emotion, but a large deficit in
recognizing disgust in others when the task
involved non-verbal responses. It has also been
shown that psychopaths fail to exhibit a
conditioned response to aver-sive Pavlovian
conditioning (Flor, Birbaumer, Hermann, Silvio,
and Patrick, 2002), which suggests deficiencies
in amygdala-dependent memory.
-
- What sets psychopathy apart from its close
relatives Conduct Disor-der and Antisocial
Personality Disorder is its distinct emotional
compo-nent. That is, psychopathy involves a
prevalent emotional profile consisting of a
considerable reduction in or lack of empathy
(Frick, O'Brien, Wooton, and McBurnett, 1994;
Hare, 2003). Psychopathy has also been found to
be inversely related to the ability to perceive
emotion (in both male and females) and managing
emotion (only in men) (Lishner, Swim, Hong, and
Vitacco, 2011).
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- 12. Hypothesis
-
- Given the nature of psychopathy and yawning
discussed herein, the current study aims to
examine the relationship between contagious
yawning and psychopathic traits. This will be
examined both by a yawn-ing paradigm designed by
the current researchers (modeled after Platek et
al., 2005) as well as an emotion-related startle
paradigm (ERS) previ-ously used in Anderson,
Stanford, Wan, and Young (2011). Affective
po-tentiation of the acoustic startle reflex (by
Electromyograph [EMG] and Galvanic skin
response [GSR]) is one of the most
prominent psycho-physiological measures of
amygdalar responsiveness (Davis, 1989; Lang,
Bradley, and Cuthbett, 1990; LeDoux, Iwata,
Cicchetti, and Reis, 1988). Psychopaths reliably
demonstrate an impairment of potentiation of the
startle reflex (Patrick, Bradley, and Lang,
1993), while healthy controls reliably
potentiate with negative affective valence and
attenu-ate the fear response with positive
affective valences (Lang et al., 1990). What's
more, Patrick et al. (1993) ; Patrick (1994)
connected the lack of potentiated startle in
psychopathy to the emotional facet of the PCL-R
(Hare, 2003) while the behavioral facet was
found to be unre-lated. Further, given the
growing evidence that contagious yawning and
empathy are evolutionarily related, a connection
between psychopathy and yawning maintains
sufficient precedence. To our knowledge, such an
examination has not been done in high
psychopathic trait individuals, nor have
contagious yawning been addressed using ERS. In
our case, we expect to find a connection between
psychopathic traits and a decreased
susceptibility to conta-giously yawn.
-
- 4. Discussion
- 4.1. Experiment one
-
- While psychopathy is not simply the lack of
empathy, endorsement of the CD subscale is
strongly indicative of damped empathic affect.
The theory that contagious yawning in our
species is largely mediated by empathy is
supported by the significant difference between
genders on probability of yawning (63.5% of
women yawned compared to 53.1% of males), as
females tend to score higher on measures of
em-pathy than males (Rueckett, Branch, and Doan,
2011). Further, as previ-ously discussed,
psychopathy is almost exclusively diagnosed in
males.
-
- It is expected that a higher percentage of
females would yawn dur-ing the paradigm;
however, since there was no statistical
difference between genders, a gender effect on
likelihood to yawn can be easily controlled.
This difference merely shows that the paradigm
itself maintains a level of validity consistent
with the existing literature that would be
expected. It is true that this is an indirect
expectation by means of empathy; to our
knowledge, no conclusive evidence between gender
and contagious yawning has been established
(Baenninger, Binkley, and Baenninger,
1996).
-
- When evaluating the all subscales, only CD
yielded significant re-sults. This is not
surprising considering that the grouping
variables SCI or FD do not wholly capture the
emotional component (or lack thereof) of
psychopathy and tend to focus on behavioral and
interpersonal factors. A difference between
groups suggests that increased CD is associated
with decreased susceptibility to a conta-gious
yawn. Further, when considering the overall
PPI-R score, which includes all subscales, 1 a
strong trend towards significance is seen, which
is likely mediated by Coldheartedness. When
compared to other sub-factors, FD and SCI,
Coldheartedness clearly maintains the largest
affective component on the PPI-R (Lilienfeld and
Widows, 2005).
-
- In line with theory and previously shown
between genders, in-creased empathy is
associated with increased susceptibility to
conta-gious yawning (Platek et al., 2003). Using
psychopathy as a predictor of susceptibility of
contagious yawning may, then, be a viable avenue
of research simply by virtue of the
interpersonal and emotional abnor-malities
associated with psychopathy. The results of this
experiment lend support to the theory that
empathy and contagious yawning are related in
our species and may work together to accomplish
social ends.
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- 4.2. Experiment two
-
- Though only males were exposed to the
startle paradigm as part of a separate study,
yawning data were collected on all participants.
A re-gression analysis showed that the
difference between the negative and neutral mean
potentiation was predictive of yawning
frequency. Experiment 2 provides physiological
data and a predictive parametric measure for
future study. In this case, the lower the
yawning suscepti-bility, the lower the
difference between neutral and negative startle
re-sponse (resulting in an overall higher
numerical value). The negative correlation
between the neutral-negative difference and
yawning fre-quency shows that the higher the
frequency of yawns, the greater the difference
between the neutral-negative difference
(resulting in a more negative numerical value).
Thus, the greater the measured psy-chopathic
traits, the lower the startle potentiation and,
therefore, the lower difference value between
neutral and negative. On the other hand,
individuals with lower levels of psychopathic
traits showed greater startle potentiation,
which produces a greater difference value.
-
- The relationship between startle
potentiation and emotional dysreg-ulation is
well studied. Aside from the psychopathy-related
research currently presented, startle
potentiation is seen in emotional disorders
involving increased (and dysregulated) emotional
disposition including anxiety and depression
(see Ballard et al., 2014). The available
research gives sufficient pretense to the data
collected in these experiments. Our data suggest
that one's level of psychopathic traits and
startle reactivity are related to one's
susceptibility to contagious yawning. That is to
say, a well-established physiological measure of
psychopathic traits is also highly associated
with the susceptibility to contagious yawning.
The less emotion-related startle reactivity
observed, the lower the susceptibility to
contagiously yawn. Both independent variables
have a strong relationship to empathic behavior
and emotional regulation, and taken together,
provide insight into the complex nature of
yawning and social interaction. While no
conclusion can be drawn at this time, these data
are steps forward in elucidating the function of
contagious yawning in our species. Further, this
invites inquiry into amygdalar reactivity as
measured by ERS and the PCC, precuneus,
thalamus, and PHG, involved in empathy and
self-referent processing (Platek et al., 2005).
Platek et al. suggests these areas may be
related to the general sensory aspects of
face-processing.
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- 5. Conclusion
-
- To our knowledge, no experiments showing the
relationship between startle potentiation,
psychopathy, and yawning have been published. It
is, however, established the relationship
between psychopathy and startle as well as the
relationship between yawning and empathy
(Norscia and Palagi, 2011). Though pilot in
nature, our data suggests that startle
potentiation to negative stimuli may predict
one's susceptibility to contagious yawning. In
line with the theories presented on yawning and
startle, it is reasonable to expect that low
startle potentiation is related to yawning
susceptibility, as affect is highly considered
in both realms of research. There is also an
evolutionary justification for the results found
here-in. While psychopathic traits are not the
direct inverse of empathetic traits, both are
constructs that seem to capture polarized
behaviors.
-
- Coldheartedness refers to a dearth of social
emotion (Lilienfeld and Widows, 2005). That is,
it is an inconsideration of the emotional state
of others. Our results, then, fit well into the
evolutionary model that contagious yawning in
our species is a function of empathy, as we have
shown that those who are characteristically
lacking in empathy are less susceptible to a
contagious yawn when prompted in a paradigm
known to induce contagious yawning in normal
individuals (Platek et al., 2003).
-
- The results of these two experiments are
clear indicators that psychopathy is a robust,
multifaceted disposition, where a strict
interpretation of an overall PPI-R score is not
necessarily a predictive one. Rather, attention
to subscales and, of course, clinical
evaluations are clearly more appropriate for
predictability. While gender effects between
yawning susceptibility may exist, the gender
effect is controlled in the current study. Of
course, the use of females in the startle-yawn
paradigm would be important in future studies,
as psychopathy is not a sex-dependent phenomenon
(Anderson et al., 2011). The emotional component
of the PPI-R is likely the most relevant to the
experiments herein. While the overall measure is
possibly too broad a measure for these purposes,
it nonetheless lends support to the developing
idea that psychopathy, empathy, and contagious
yawning are related.
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