Gelotophobia is a fear of being laughed at, a type of social phobia. While most people do not like being laughed at, in his clinical observations, German psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Michael Titze (1996) discovered that some of his patients seemed to be primarily worried about being laughed at. They tended to scan their environment for signs of laughter and ridicule. Furthermore, they reported that they had the impression of being ridiculous themselves. Additionally, Titze observed a specific movement pattern among them when they thought they were being laughed at—awkward, wooden movement
via Wikipedia infobox
Gelotophobia is a fear of being laughed at, a type of social phobia. While most people do not like being laughed at, in his clinical observations, German psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Michael Titze (1996) discovered that some of his patients seemed to be primarily worried about being laughed at. They tended to scan their environment for signs of laughter and ridicule. Furthermore, they reported that they had the impression of being ridiculous themselves. Additionally, Titze observed a specific movement pattern among them when they thought they were being laughed at—awkward, wooden movements that resembled those of wooden puppets. He described this state as "Pinocchio-syndrome".
== Causes == From the clinical observations a model of the causes and consequences of gelotophobia was drawn up so that the condition could be studied scientifically. The model claims that gelotophobia can be caused by any one of three things at different stages of development:
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).