Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren vog Obam here with another classic episode from our former host, Christian Sager. This one is about one of my favorite topics that's something of a mystery to science, dog psychology, and more specifically, social yawning. Hey brain Stuff, it's Christian Sager. I've got to come clean.
I like dogs. In fact, I own to my dog, Winchester, does this thing whenever I get home from work, where he's super excited and he's jumping around all happy, and then he starts yawning for some reason. I don't know. Maybe he's just tired, or maybe he's waking up. I don't know, but he seems pretty delighted. And yawning is one of the primary ways dogs communicate in their whole complicated system of subtle body language. It could mean several things.
Did you know that yawning is actually the first expression dogs learn to use when they're tiny puppies, So it has multiple meanings depending on the situation a dog is in. Dogs usually yawn when they want to send a pacifying or calming signal out to other dogs or people, like, Hey, everybody, let's take a breather and just chill out. Okay. Yawns have no element of fear or aggression for dogs. It's like the exact opposite of a threat. So imagine this.
You're in a fistfight and all you have to do is just be like, yeawn, nothing dangerous or intimidating here, just I'm I'm like bored. But wait, why would my dog do that to me? Okay? Sometimes dogs yawn when they're getting obedience training. If a dog is frustrated, he might be asking you to give him a little break, That is, if he sees you as the dominant one in your relationship. It could also mean that your dog
might be just cooling off his brain. There's a veterinary behaviorist at you See Davis that thinks dog brains get hot during periods of inactivity. Dog brains get warm because their circulation slows down, so yawning supposedly cools the arterial blood down, helping the dog's brain function. There's one other thing that yawning and dogs might mean. Dogs also yawn when they're dealing with anxiety or uncertainty, and this includes being excited. So maybe my dog is just trying to
control his enthusiasm. And Oh also, dogs yawn when they're nervous too, Like in a VETS office. Do you yawn when you're nervous? Check this out. Dogs can also catch yawning from the human beings around them. You know how if you yawn, then other people in the room around you often start yawning. Well, that often has to do with a person's capacity for empathy, you know, feeling what
somebody else feels. Well, there was a study about this that was published in a journal called Biology Letters in two thousand and eight, and they said twenty one out of twenty nine dogs yawned at least once in response to the yawn of an assistant in the room with them. Human to dog yawn contagion. It sounds like the beginning of a zombie movie where everyone just yawned at each other. Today's episode was written by Christian and produced by Tyler Clang.
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