Make it to the end without so much as a twitching mouth? Maybe you’re a psychopath, suggests new research in Personality and Individual Differences.
Your susceptibility to contagious yawning is linked to your ability to empathize with others, researchers say. So if your face stays stone cold while your friend opens wide, you could at least have some psychopathic characteristics, says study author Brian Rundle, Ph.D.
What makes a psychopath, exactly? When we posed this question to psychiatrist David M. Reiss, M.D., for another Men’s Health story, he said it’s someone who’s “sadistic, or whose main intention is to manipulate others and gets satisfaction from doing that.”
RELATED: Is Your Boss a Psychopath or Sociopath?
Maybe you automatically conjure up a Walter White-style criminal who murders others without remorse. But plenty of successful people exhibit classic psychopathic traits, too—and some of these qualities double as great business attributes, like viciousness and narcissism.
According to a 2011 study in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, bosses are four times more likely to be psychopathic than the average worker. These hard-working hotshots are ruthless when necessary, and their lack of empathy helps them make tough decisions—like laying people off—which in turn can propel them up the corporate ladder.
(See 10 Ways Your Boss Lied and Cheated to Get to Where He Is Now)
The tradeoff: While such traits may make you good at business, they don’t always make you a good person.
Ultimately, psychopaths only represent about 1 percent of the general population, so the chances are pretty slim that you—or your boss—is an actual psycho.
As for that yawn test, if you didn’t let one out after watching the video, you could’ve just been stressed or absent-minded, says Rundle. And this isn’t a guaranteed measure to make a psychological assessment anyway, he says.
Additional reporting by Daedalus Howell.