Is Yawning Contagious?

Overview

Objectives/Goals My expirament was to find out weather or not fake and real yawns are contagious. Methods/Materials In my project I will see if more people can copy yawns when they are real or fake. I will go to four classes at school with a friend and I will also get a poem b Langston Hughes. The first time I go to the classes I will read the poem and open my mouth wide and make the yawning noise right in the middle and my friend will tally how many people yawn after five minutes. After two weeks I will go to the same four classes and while I am reading the poem to them I will yawn. I will wait five minutes again to see how many people yawn and my friend will tally it. In the end I will compare the difference between peoples reaction the real and fake yawns. Results In my results I found out that it doesn#t matter if my yawn was real or fake. Each class I went to had a different outcome to my experiment. Sometimes it was even, sometimes when I fake yawned more people yawned, and sometimes when I real yawned more people yawned. Conclusions/Discussion In the beginning of my experiment before I started, my hypothesis was that it would not matter if I real or fake yawned. I was right; all of my results were different. I learned that if someone sees someone else opening his or her mouth big even if its not a real yawn, that person will yawn at least five minutes after. In my experiment one class yawned more to the real yawn, two classes yawned less to the real yawn, and one class yawned exactly the same. My limitations are that I only studied the reactions of middle school students while I read a Langston Hughes poem. Some of the errors in my project were that while I was reading my poem not everyone was looking at me or I didn#t yawn clearly enough. In the future I can make sure that everyone is looking at me the whole time and maybe talk about something interesting so that they will want to look up.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0309

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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