But humans don't seem to be the only animals that feed off the emotions of others. Dogs, some argue, might feel something like empathy. So, if empathy causes contagious yawning and dogs appear to feel empathy for humans, then perhaps dogs can catch our yawns. After all, "Dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative cues," the authors point out. "They can follow human gaze and pointing, they can show sensitivity to others' knowledge states (e.g. indicating the location of a hidden toy more frequently to someone not involved in hiding it than to someone who did the hiding) and they are even able to match their own actions to observed human actions."

So, the intrepid scholars devised exactly the experiment you'd imagine. They sat a dog down in front of a human experimenter and had that person either A) yawn or B) make "non-yawning mouth-opening actions."





The existence of human-to-dog yawn contagion appeared to be settled. And more intriguingly, there was hard evidence that an empathy-linked behavior could be induced in canines.



But other experimenters weren't so sure about the results. A group at Hiram College in Ohio



That wasn't considered a knockout blow, though. A hopeful 2010 study attempted to test the hypothesis that contagious yawning in dogs in caused by empathy. The British researchers figured that if empathy is really driving contagious yawning, then the dogs would be more likely to respond to their owners' yawns because of their preexisting emotional connection. They took 19 dogs and had the owners and strangers yawn at them. Unfortunately, of the 38 trial runs, the dogs only yawned five times -- and all five were in response to strangers.



"Our results provide no support for empathy-based, emotionally connected yawning contagion in dogs and casts doubt on the recently documented phenomenon of cross-species contagious yawning,"



We still would like to believe that our animals empathize with us, perhaps because we empathize with them. (Who hasn't given her dog a birthday present?) But the balance of evidence right now seems to suggest that dogs don't yawn in response to our yawns. They might not be the empaths we want them to be.



On the other hand, just look at my dad's new dog's eyes! I'm pretty sure she's staring right into my soul.





What happened? Well, in this single experiment, 21 of the 29 dogs exposed to the yawn appeared to yawn in response. None of the dogs in the control for the experiment yawned. In fact, the rate of yawn contagion was higher than that reported in experiments with humans or chimpanzees.The existence of human-to-dog yawn contagion appeared to be settled. And more intriguingly, there was hard evidence that an empathy-linked behavior could be induced in canines.But other experimenters weren't so sure about the results. A group at Hiram College in Ohio published a paper in 2009 directly contradicting the earlier results. They showed 17 dogs a video of a person yawning and only one of the dogs yawned.That wasn't considered a knockout blow, though. A hopeful 2010 study attempted to test the hypothesis that contagious yawning in dogs in caused by empathy. The British researchers figured that if empathy is really driving contagious yawning, then the dogs would be more likely to respond to their owners' yawns because of their preexisting emotional connection. They took 19 dogs and had the owners and strangers yawn at them. Unfortunately, of the 38 trial runs, the dogs only yawned five times -- and all five were in response to strangers."Our results provide no support for empathy-based, emotionally connected yawning contagion in dogs and casts doubt on the recently documented phenomenon of cross-species contagious yawning," the researchers rather glumly concluded . "We interpret our findings as showing that if dogs are seen yawning contagiously then the contagion must be explained on less cognitively stringent grounds than empathy."We still would like to believe that our animals empathize with us, perhaps because we empathize with them. (Who hasn't given her dog a birthday present?) But the balance of evidence right now seems to suggest that dogs don't yawn in response to our yawns. They might not be the empaths we want them to be.On the other hand, just look at my dad's new dog's eyes! I'm pretty sure she's staring right into my soul.



