|
- mise à jour
du
- 21 mai
2026
- Curr
Biol.
- 2026;36(10):2696-2702.e4.
|
- Prenatal
behavioral contagion
- through
maternal yawning and fetal
resonance
- D'Adamo G, Dall'Asta A, Ardizzi M,
Sorrentino S, Mora V,
- Arenare G, D'Amario P, Capurso M, Ferroni
F,
- Ollari Ischimji D, Ferrari C, Ghi T, Gallese
V.
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- Tous
les articles sur la contagion du
bâillement
- All
articles about contagious
yawning
-
-
- Abstract
- Yawning is a phylogenetically preserved and
highly stereotyped behavior observed across
vertebrates. In humans, it emerges early in
development, as it is already present
prenatally. Qualitative studies show that fetal
yawns display a structured motor pattern closely
resembling adult yawns, suggesting a role in
early sensorimotor organization and they have
been proposed to support the maturation of
brainstem central pattern generators and early
synaptic development.
-
- Due to its early emergence in development,
prenatal yawning has largely been interpreted as
driven by endogenous programs, whereas in
postnatal life, yawning can also be shaped by
the social context through contagion, a
phenomenon linked to sensorimotor mirroring and
affective attunement. Here, the authors tested
whether prenatal yawning may also be modulated
by maternal behavior. Using ultrasound
recordings of fetal facial activity combined
with controlled elicitation of maternal yawning,
they show that fetal yawning selectively
increases following maternal yawns but not
during non-contagious control conditions.
-
- Temporal analyses reveal structured
coordination between maternal and fetal yawning,
and machine-learning classification identifies
shared kinematic signatures across maternal and
fetal yawns. These findings suggest that fetal
yawning might also be embedded within a dyadic
sensorimotor context in which maternal behavior
shapes fetal expression, suggesting that forms
of behavioral resonance and embodied alignment
precede birth and contribute to the early
foundations of social attunement.
-
- Résumé
- Le bâillement est un comportement
conservé sur le plan
phylogénétique et hautement
stéréotypé, observé
chez tous les vertébrés. Chez
l'être humain, il apparaît
très tôt au cours du
développement, puisqu'il est
déjà présent avant la
naissance. Des études qualitatives
montrent que les bâillements fœtaux
présentent un schéma moteur
structuré qui ressemble
étroitement à celui des
bâillements adultes, ce qui suggère
un rôle dans l'organisation sensorimotrice
précoce ; on a d'ailleurs émis
l'hypothèse qu'ils favorisent la
maturation des générateurs de
schémas centraux du tronc
cérébral et le
développement synaptique
précoce.
-
- En raison de son apparition précoce
au cours du développement, le
bâillement prénatal a
été largement
interprété comme étant
guidé par des programmes
endogènes, alors que dans la vie
postnatale, le bâillement peut
également être
façonné par le contexte social par
le biais de la contagion, un
phénomène lié au
mimétisme sensorimoteur et à
l'harmonisation affective. Ici, les auteurs ont
cherché à déterminer si le
bâillement prénatal pouvait
également être modulé par le
comportement maternel. À l'aide
d'enregistrements échographiques de
l'activité faciale fœtale
combinés à une provocation
contrôlée de bâillements
maternels, ils montrent que le bâillement
fœtal augmente de manière
sélective à la suite de
bâillements maternels, mais pas dans des
conditions de contrôle non
contagieuses.
-
- Des analyses temporelles
révèlent une coordination
structurée entre les bâillements
maternels et fœtaux, et une classification
par apprentissage automatique identifie des
signatures cinématiques communes aux
bâillements maternels et fœtaux. Ces
résultats suggèrent que le
bâillement fœtal pourrait
également s'inscrire dans un contexte
sensorimoteur dyadique dans lequel le
comportement maternel façonne
l'expression fœtale, ce qui laisse entendre
que des formes de résonance
comportementale et d'alignement incarné
précèdent la naissance et
contribuent aux fondements précoces de
l'harmonisation sociale.
- Discussion
- This study shows how fetal yawning is
responsive to the maternal physiological
environment during contagious stimulation,
suggesting that prenatal motor patterns can be
entrained by dyadic states. This finding
suggests a greater continuity between pre- and
postnatal behavioral organization than is
typically assumed. Specifically, it indicates
that even a highly stereotyped fetal motor
pattern, commonly regarded as largely
endogenously driven, could be embedded within a
dyadic context sensitive to maternal
physiological changes. More broadly, these
findings support the view that the prenatal
period should not be considered solely as a
stage of internally programmed maturation but
also as a relational context in which shared
physiological dynamics shape fetal expression in
systematic ways.10,11,12,13
-
- Recent work suggests that pregnant women may
be especially susceptible to yawn contagion,
possibly as a consequence of hormonal and
neurobiological changes associated with
pregnancy.14,15,16 Consistent with this
literature, nearly two-thirds of the mothers in
our sample yawned during the contagion
condition, a proportion that appears higher than
the rates typically reported in the general
population (40%&endash;60%).8,17,18 To evaluate
whether maternal and fetal yawns are coherently
related, we applied complementary analyses that
considered both when and how often yawns occur
within and across dyads. Our analyses revealed a
consistent dyadic pattern. Yawning occurred
selectively in the contagion condition for both
mothers and fetuses, and joint mother-fetus
yawning was observed more often than expected by
chance. Moreover, fetal yawns tended to follow
maternal yawns with a structured delay, and
yawning frequency was positively associated
within dyads. Overall, these findings suggest
how this phenomenon might reflect a form of
prenatal behavioral contingency that may operate
alongside other physiological mechanisms shaping
fetal yawning, rather than reflecting a purely
autonomous account of fetal motor
activity.19,20
-
- These findings are consistent with postnatal
human and animal evidence showing that yawning
is shaped not only by physiological variables
but also by social context, most notably through
contagious yawning.9 Our results extend this
broader framework to the prenatal period by
showing that fetal yawning is part of a shared
dyadic response. Of course, the present findings
cannot be interpreted as evidence of behavioral
contagion mediated by perceptual mirroring.
Rather, they are more consistent with a form of
intrauterine physiological contagion, likely
grounded in the bodily and interoceptive
consequences of maternal actions. Indeed, this
physiological resonance may be mediated by a
combination of mechanical and hormonal signals:
potentially, the biomechanical pressure changes
induced by maternal yawning may provide
proprioceptive cues to the fetus,21,22,23 while
a shared neuroendocrine milieu24,25 further
aligns fetal responsivity to maternal states,
creating a multimodal physiological signal
capable of entraining fetal resonance. In this
perspective, contagious yawning may be
understood as the socially recruited expression
of a motor pattern that is already robust and
available early in development. Considered
longitudinally across pre- and postnatal life,
the developmental trajectory of yawn contagion
is therefore unlikely to reflect the emergence
of the motor template itself. Instead, it may
reflect the gradual maturation of the
attentional, social, and regulatory systems that
govern when and how that template becomes
behaviorally expressed in response to
others.
-
- The analyses of temporal dynamics and shared
kinematic features of maternal and fetal yawning
further support this interpretation.
Machine-learning models trained on maternal
yawns were able to identify fetal yawns, and
models trained on fetal yawns worked similarly
with maternal yawns. This cross-prediction
performance indicates that the spatiotemporal
organization of yawning is sufficiently
conserved to generalize across developmental
stages. These findings are consistent with the
view that yawning is a highly stereotyped and
evolutionarily preserved motor pattern, likely
supported by early maturing brainstem circuitry
and largely independent of voluntary
control.26,27 In this respect, our
cross-prediction analysis provides initial
computational evidence that yawning is
characterized by a conserved motor signature
spanning fetal life and adulthood.
-
- A preserved motor functional architecture
may constitute a necessary, but not sufficient,
substrate to account for contagious expression.
Examining the temporal organization of yawning
within the mother-fetus dyad provides a
complementary perspective on how this conserved
motor pattern may become embedded in interactive
dynamics. Latency analyses are, indeed,
consistent with a selective mother-fetus
temporal linkage. Maternal and fetal yawns were
not randomly distributed in time, and the delay
between maternal and fetal yawning resembled the
delay between the onset of the contagion
stimulus and maternal yawning. Although this
pattern does not imply intentional coordination,
it suggests a structured temporal contingency
within the dyad. More generally, it is
compatible with the possibility that shared
physiological rhythms contribute to the
alignment of maternal and fetal behavior.
-
- Postnatal yawn contagion can be elicited by
multiple classes of cues, including visual,
auditory, and semantic signals, and when
present, it typically unfolds within the first
few minutes after stimulus
exposure.8,17,28,29,30 Against this background,
the inconsistent expression of contagious
yawning in infants and preschool children
observed in standard experimental paradigms,
even when the model is socially salient,31 does
not necessarily indicate the absence of
contagion or of the motor mechanisms that
support it. Rather, it likely reflects the
ongoing maturation of the neural and perceptual
systems that allow different social cues to
effectively recruit a conserved motor pattern.
This interpretation is consistent with evidence
that contagious yawning may emerge earlier in
naturalistic social settings than in
decontextualized tasks32,33 and more broadly
with models of social development emphasizing
the gradual integration and specialization of
increasingly complex social signals across
infancy and childhood.34,35 From this
perspective, future work could adopt
longitudinal, pre- to postnatal, and multimodal
designs to track how early forms of dyadic
resonance develop into foundational components
of social cognition.
-
- Several limitations of this study should be
acknowledged. First, the sample size constrains
generalizability and limits the analysis of
interindividual variability. Second, the study
focused on a relatively narrow gestational
window (28&endash;32 weeks), making it unclear
when this form of mother-fetus coupling first
emerges and whether its temporal or kinematic
features change across pregnancy, particularly
closer to term. Third, although the present
design demonstrates behavioral contingency, it
does not identify the physiological pathway
through which maternal yawning influences fetal
behavior. Future studies should therefore
examine larger and more diverse samples, test
broader gestational ranges, and directly assess
potential moderating and mediating factors,
including gestational age, parity, and maternal
physiological state. It will be important to
integrate explicit and physiological indices of
maternal stress, combining self-report measures
such as the perceived stress scale36 with
biological markers including maternal cortisol
levels and fetal heart rate variability, to
better map the neurophysiological foundations of
this dyadic alignment.
-
- In conclusion, this study provides
the first empirical evidence that fetal yawning
can resonate with maternal behavior. These
findings challenge the view of fetal behavior as
purely reflexive or entirely self-contained and
instead support a picture of the fetus as an
organism whose behavioral expression is already
integrated into a shared biological context.
More broadly, the study suggests that examining
maternal behavior and its impact on fetal action
may help clarify the earliest foundations of
co-regulation and embodied development, which
later support motor and social competencies
after birth.10,13,37,38
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