Modeling Yawning Contagion as a Reaction-Diffusion System: Emergence of Turing Patterns in Behavioral Contagion

When we see someone yawning, we often feel compelled to yawn ourselves -a phenomenon known as behavioral contagion in psychology.While one person's yawn acts as an activator that triggers yawns in others, we sometimes suppress the urge to yawn in situations like meetings, representing an inhibitor of this behavior.We formulated this yawning contagion as a reaction-diffusion phenomenon in an activator-inhibitor system and confirmed the emergence of Turing patterns.Our findings provide a theoretical framework for understanding and potentially controlling the spread of social behaviors in human populations.