Seeing someone yawn — or sometimes merely hearing a yawn — can quickly produce an urge to yawn in another person. This is called contagious yawning. It is a repeatable experimental phenomenon, not merely suggestion, although there is still no single, fully established explanation for why it occurs.
Brain-imaging studies have found activity in regions involved in processing social cues when people watch yawns. Other work using transcranial magnetic stimulation found that differences in motor-cortex excitability and inhibition predicted how susceptible individuals were to contagious yawning. This points to an automatic perception–action component, but it is too simple to say that people merely copy yawns through a “mirror-neuron” mechanism.
A popular explanation has linked contagious yawning with empathy. Some studies have reported associations with social closeness, but later reviews found the overall evidence inconsistent and identified possible confounds such as attention. So catching another person's yawn is a real biological and behavioural response, but it is not a reliable test of how empathic someone is.
Sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28867202/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28735879/
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