Gelotophobia ?

Did you know what is gelotophobia? No, it is not people who love Italian ice cream or gelato. It is rather a peculiar disorder which describes people who have a “fear of being laughed at” and comes from the Greek for laughter gelos and fear phobia.

While most people do not like being laughed at, there seems to be a sub-group of people that carry this fear to an excessive degree. Without obvious reasons, they relate laughter they hear e.g., in a restaurant to themselves and feel unease when confronted with laughter. They seem to forget that laughter is an emotional expression that is innate in human beings and that laughing at others is a universal phenomenon. However, the fear of being laughed at causes some people enormous problems in their social lives and seems to afflict people in all cultures alike.

According to experts, people can be classified within two opposite poles involved in the fear of being laughed at – the 'insecurity reaction' dimension (trying to hide one's lack of self-confidence from others, or believing that one is involuntarily funny) and 'avoidance reactions', whereby one avoids situations in which one has been laughed at, and the dimension of low-high tendencies to suspect that if others are laughing, they are laughing at you.

Although this phenomenon is shared by all cultures, the study shows there are certain differences. Countries such as Turkmenistan and Cambodia are represented within the first dimension of insecurity reactions, while people in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan are much more likely to avoid situations in which they have been laughed at. Spain is "slightly inclined towards the insecurity pole".

Another strange result is that people in Finland are the least likely to believe that if people laugh in their presence they are laughing at them (8.5%), while 80% of people in Thailand believe this to be the case.

What are the consequences of gelotophobia:

• Social withdrawal to avoid being ridiculed
• Appearing ‘cold as ice’ or humourless
• Psychosomatic disturbances e.g. blushing, tension headache, trembling, dizziness, sleep disturbances
• ‘Pinocchio Syndrome’ or reacting in a wooden manner
• Lacking of liveliness, spontaneity, joy
• They do find humour or laughter as relaxing and joyful social experiences

Morbidly averse to being the butt of a joke, these folks will go out of their way to avoid certain people or situations for fear of being ridiculed. For them, merely being around others who are talking and laughing can cause tension and apprehension. Until recently, such people might have been written off as spoilsports. But in the mid-1990s, an astute German psychologist recognized the problem for what it is: a debilitating fear of being laughed at. It is true that most people fear being laughed at to some degree and do their best to avoid embarrassment. But one thing that sets gelotophobes apart is their inability to distinguish ridicule from playful teasing. For them, all laughter is aggressive, and a harmless joke may come across as a mean-spirited assault.

“They seem to have problems interpreting humor correctly,” says psychologist Willibald Ruch of the University of Zurich. “They probably do not understand the positive side of humor, and cannot experience it in a warm way but rather as a means to put others down.”

When asked about recent occasions where they were laughed at, gelotophobes don’t list more occurrences than others do. They do, however, experience such events as more painful. Many admit to some fear of being laughed at, but gelotophobes feel this fear, often along with shame, to the extreme. Studies using cartoons to illustrate people laughing in various situations show that those with a fear of being laughed at are more likely to assume that the laughter is directed at them. Other studies using laugh tracks show that gelotophobes have problems distinguishing a happy har-de-har from a scornful snicker.

The funny thing about laughter is that it’s seldom about what’s funny. When Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, took to the streets and coffee shops to record instances of laughter, he found that most laughter had little to do with humor. People laughed when they’re nervous, hesitant or just making polite conversation. Most smiles and laughs occur when other people are around. For most, laughter simply serves as a signal for mutual liking and well-being.

But, unfortunately, not everyone feels the joy of laughter. To provide a more complete picture of how people deal with laughter, Ruch and his colleagues have recently expanded their studies to describe two other humor-related concepts: The joy of being laughed at — or gelotophilia — and the joy of laughing at others, or katagelasticism.

“Humor and mockery are part of a complex interaction —namely, someone does something wrong and gets laughed at,” Ruch says. “But there’s also someone who laughs, and likely a bystander who maybe doesn’t do the ridiculing but approves of it. But …why is it that something so human, which brings enjoyment to most everyone, is actually experienced so negatively by a few.”