No Laughing Matter
(from Science magazine 8 May 2009, Vol 324, Issue 5928, "Random Samples" section)

In Central Europe, homeland of psychoanalysis, psychologists have been exploring a hitherto uncodified facet of the human personality: gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at.

In the latest of a spate of papers on the condition, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Ilona Papousek of the University of Graz, Austria, and colleagues report that people with gelotophobia (from gelos, Greek for laughter) have weak control over their emotions and are hypersensitive to others' negative moods.

Co-author Willibald Ruch of the University of Zurich in Switzerland says researchers have developed a 15-item scale that can distinguish the problem from social phobias or "shame-based" neuroticism. For example, he says, gelotophobes "distrust smiling faces" and "are not able to discriminate between friendly and hostile laughter" or between teasing and ridicule. That can lead to serious consequences, says Ruch, citing two recent school shootings in Germany in which the perpetrators reportedly had a horror of being mocked. About 10% of the population has some degree of gelotophobia, he says.

In tests of the scale in 74 countries, Scandinavians ranked among the least gelotophobia-prone groups, whereas people in Muslim countries and in Africa tended to score high. The highest scores in Europe were from the United Kingdom—suggesting, Ruch says, that "maybe a well-developed sense of humor does not help [where] mock[ery] and ridicule are cultivated too."