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The fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) in adults and children: testing trait-congruent false memories in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm

  • Kay Brauer

    Kay Brauer is a post-doctoral research assistant at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His primary research interests are in the study of individual differences in adult playfulness and dispositions toward ridicule and being laughed at, particularly regarding their role in social relationships.

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    and René T. Proyer

    René T. Proyer is a full professor in Psychological Assessment and Differential Psychology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His research interests are in psychological assessment, personality psychology and positive psychology. Currently he focuses on the assessment, correlates, and the malleability of playfulness in adults. He is the current president of the European Association of Psychological Assessment and head of the Edmund-Sackbauer-Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Northern Slovenia.

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From the journal HUMOR

Abstract

The fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) is an individual differences variable characterized by negative reactions to laughter. Based on the theory of trait-congruent information processing, we conducted a series of experiments to examine a gelotophobia-related memory bias toward laughter in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. The DRM is a reliable method to provoke false memories (FM). In Study 1 (101 adults), gelotophobia related positively to FM of the “laughter”-lure in recognition, and greater confidence in that FM (d ≤ 0.32). However, findings did not replicate in independent samples of 167 adults and 172 children of the preregistered Study 2. Aggregating the findings across studies indicated that gelotophobia is unrelated to laughter-related FM in the DRM paradigm (d ≤ 0.10) and that FM do not account for gelotophobes’ memories of ridicule.


Corresponding author: Kay Brauer, Department of Psychology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Emil-Abderhalden-Straße 26-27, 06099 Halle, Germany, E-mail:

About the authors

Kay Brauer

Kay Brauer is a post-doctoral research assistant at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His primary research interests are in the study of individual differences in adult playfulness and dispositions toward ridicule and being laughed at, particularly regarding their role in social relationships.

René T. Proyer

René T. Proyer is a full professor in Psychological Assessment and Differential Psychology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His research interests are in psychological assessment, personality psychology and positive psychology. Currently he focuses on the assessment, correlates, and the malleability of playfulness in adults. He is the current president of the European Association of Psychological Assessment and head of the Edmund-Sackbauer-Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Northern Slovenia.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Melanie Becker and Valerie Weigel for their help with collecting the data, and to Rebekka Sendatzki for helping with formal preparations of the manuscript. Study 2 has been pre-registered. All data and syntaxes are available at the Open Science Framework (osf.io/t7dbc/).

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2021-0035).


Received: 2020-08-19
Revised: 2021-11-25
Accepted: 2022-03-25
Published Online: 2023-03-10
Published in Print: 2023-05-25

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