Contagious yawning — yawning after seeing someone else yawn — occurs across several social species and is often used as a marker of social bonding and empathy.
Experiments show dogs yawn more after watching a familiar human yawn than after a control stimulus, and the response is stronger for people they know.
This dovetails with other findings that dogs are sensitive to human emotional states, tuning into our faces, voices, and body language.
It is a small, charming window into the deep interspecies connection dogs have evolved with people.
