Everyone knows someone who just might be a real psychopath, but how can you be certain? A recent study puts one more tool into your detection arsenal:psychopaths are much less likely to yawn around others who have yawned, basically because they’re lacking in the empathy that makes the yawn contagion mechanism work. So while it’s not exactly conclusive, that troublesome coworker’s failure to yawn around the water cooler before an early-morning meeting might actually mean something after all.
A team of psychologists from Baylor University in Texas used experimental participants (both male and female) given a psychopathy personality test to investigate how yawning is related to empathy.
