14 DAY TRIAL // What separates regular folks from psychopaths is the ability to experience empathy. Ordinary folks are perfectly capable to empathize. Those with psychopathic traits, well, not so much.
Interestingly, a recent study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences proposes that their inability to relate to others also makes psychopaths immune to contagious yawning.
Plainly put, they have no trouble hanging around people who keep yawning without feeling the need to yawn themselves. Of course, that's not to say the same can't be true about perfectly normal folks.
“The take-home lesson is not that if you yawn and someone else doesn’t, the other person is a psychopath,” researcher Brian Rundle with Baylor University said in a statement.
“There is a neurological connection - some overlap - between psychopathy and contagious yawning. This is a good starting point to ask more questions,” he added.
Psychopathy and contagious yawning
As part of their investigation into how psychopathic traits influence an individual's vulnerability to contagious yawning, study leader and Brian Rundle and fellow researchers carried out a series of experiments.
They gathered around 135 students and had them take a test designed to reveal whatever psychopathic traits they might have possessed.
Then, the volunteers were shown 10-second video clips of different facial expressions, among these footage of people yawning.
Apparently, the volunteers who showed little empathy in their personality tests failed to yawn in response to the clips, indicating that there really is a link between psychopathy and being immune to contagious yawning.
Then again, it could be that these alleged psychopaths didn't yawn because the clips showed perfect strangers they shared no bond with.
Don't believe everything you see on TV
Just for the record, it should be mentioned that, contrary to what crime-fighting TV series and movies would have us believe, not all psychopaths are cold-blooded killers or at least well on their way to becoming one.
Rather, psychology defines psychopaths as people who are particularly manipulative, selfish, lacking in empathy, domineering, fearless and impulsive.
Besides, these traits are not a package deal, meaning they don't all have to occur in the same individual. “It’s not an ‘on/off’ of whether you’re a psychopath. It’s a spectrum,” explained Brian Rundle.