For my observations post this week, I decided to track the frequency of yawns throughout Tuesday’s and Thursday’s class. Everyone has heard at one point or another that yawning is contagious, and my aim was to see if this held true for our class. While I am certain that I missed a few yawns here and there, I counted 31 yawns during Tuesday’s class and 16 yawns on Thursday. Going into the week, I thought that I would record more yawns during Thursday’s class because people may be generally more tired in the latter half of the week. This hypothesis proved to be wrong, suggesting that maybe students are more fatigued in the first part of the week, as they transition from a relaxed weekend setting back to the daily grind of classes, homework, and extra-curricular activities.
Another reason for choosing to examine in-class yawning was to attempt to see how one person’s yawning influenced their peers. Throughout the two classes, however, I didn’t observe many instances of one individual’s yawning directly causing another person to yawn. What I did notice, however, was that based on my data collection, I was the class’s most frequent yawner. On Tuesday, I was responsible for 8 of the class’s 32 yawns (25%) and on Thursday I accounted for 4 of the 16 total yawns (25%). Additionally, on both days, the table I sat at had the highest total number of yawns. I believe these two observations support the idea that yawning is contagious. First of all, I was the most frequent yawner because I was actively thinking about yawning for the entirety of both class periods. Additionally, because of my high yawning instances, the people nearest to me also yawned more than any other table in the class. While I don’t have enough evidence to conclude this with absolute certainty, I will say that scavenging the room for yawns is a more tiring process than I originally thought. Finally, to accurately gauge in-class yawning, one would need to enlist the help of an independent recorder who was far enough away from the class so as not to skew the data collection.
I wonder if you yawned so much simply because you were thinking about yawns. Yawns are certainly contagious enough that I even yawned while reading this post—even though it’s not boring at all. On the contrary, this is a very interesting matter!Reference