The association between trait anxiety and the fear of being laughed at in college: A preliminary study with a Brazilian sample

Abstract Aim To evaluate how gelotophobia correlates with trait anxiety in a sample of Brazilian college students. Methods We evaluated the association of GELOPH < 15 > scores with both self‐reported experiences of bullying victimization and trait anxiety measures assessed by the State‐Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The study consisted of a sample of 65 adult volunteers (M = 21.48, SD = 2.54 years, 38 females), recruited through social media or flyer distribution, and submitted to online versions of the gelotophobia assessment instrument (GELOPH < 15 >) and the STAI. Results Most participants (N = 56, 86.15%) had an STAI‐T score indicative of high trait anxiety. The average GELOPH < 15 > score of the sample was 2.69 (0.65) and 39 of the subjects (60%) were considered gelotophobes. There was a strong positive correlation between the GELOPH < 15 > and STAI‐T scores but no correlation between bullying and either the STAI‐T and GELOPH < 15 > scores. However, the great majority of subjects with gelotophobia reported been previously bullied. Conclusion In our sample, all gelotophobes had trait anxiety, but only a fraction of anxious subjects had gelotophobia. These preliminary findings expand on previous reports underscoring the high prevalence of mental health problems afflicting higher education students in Brazil.

interest from the audience and is enough to enhance the processing of angry faces, for instance (e.g. Wieser et al., 2010). However, in the same situation, some individuals with a condition called gelotophobia can interpret positive signs as threatening and be unwilling to speak in front of classmates, for instance (Barabadi et al., 2021).
Gelotophobia was first described as the "pathological fear of being laughed at" (Gelotophobia, 2009) and it shares many characteristics with SAD and avoidant personality disorders (AvPD), such as fear of negative evaluation, shyness, increased attention to social threats, and the presence of cognitive distortions that involve fear and mistrust of other individuals' intentions (Ruch et al., 2014;Fenigstein & Vanable, 1992). Gelotophobes display a negative association with the accuracy of positively valenced stimuli, such as laughter, and also make more errors than non-gelotophobes in a gaze discrimination task used to evaluate theory of mind (TOM) (Torres-Marín et al., 2017). Gelotophobia can be measured by the GELOPH < 15 > questionnaire (Ruch & Proyer, 2008) and its cross-cultural relevance has been demonstrated elsewhere (Lampert et al., 2010;Proyer et al., 2009). Some questions that remain unanswered about gelotophobia are associated with its developmental underpinnings. For instance, though bullying victimization is positively correlated to the presence of anxiety in children and adolescents (Pontillo et al., 2019), less is known about its associations with gelotophobia Proyer et al., 2013;Edwards et al., 2010).
Gelotophobia is a relatively new concept and shares traits with other conditions associated with the introverted neurotic personality type. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) provides two measures two types of anxiety-state anxiety (STAI-S) and trait anxiety (STAI-T) (Spielberger & Gorsuch, 1983). The STAI-T is a strong indicator for clinical depression and anxiety disorders (Knowles & Olatunji, 2020). Since gelotophobes are often unaware of their condition and may consider themselves as having anxiety instead, in the present study, we recruited a sample of college students who selfidentified as anxious and evaluated the association of their STAI-T and GELOPH < 15 > scores. Our goal was to have a grasp of (1) the proportion of individuals with gelotophobia among those with trait anxiety, (2) the dimensional characteristics of traits related to trait anxiety, (3) the association of early episodes of bullying with GELOPH < 15 > scores, and (4) contribute to the understanding of the cultural underpinnings of gelotophobia by studying a Brazilian sample.

Participants
The volunteers were undergraduate students from the Federal Uni-

Experimental procedures
We used the GELOPH < 15 > and the STAI to measure the fear of being laughed at and trait anxiety, respectively. The Portuguese version of the GELOPH < 15 >  is based on the self-reported responses to 15 questions structured in a 4-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = "strongly disagree", 2 = "moderately disagree", 3 = "moderately agree", and 4 = "strongly agree") (Ruch & Proyer, 2008 The STAI is composed of two parts, the STAI-State (STAI-S) and the STAI-Trait (STAI-T) (Spielberger & Gorsuch, 1983), which measure anxiety as a transient and as a lasting and recurrent condition, respectively (Biaggio et al., 1977). In this study, only trait anxiety analysis (STAI-T) will be used. Each questionnaire consists of 20 self-report questions based on a 4-point Likert scale. The results were summed, resulting in a score ranging from 20 to 80 points (Spielberger & Gorsuch, 1983).
Participants were also asked about their personal experience with bullying through four questions: "Have you ever been bullied?", "If so, when?", "If so, where?", "What type of bullying?" The candidate could choose more than one answer from the following (depend- ing on the answer to the first question): "yes," "no, I don't know"; "childhood, adolescence, currently"; "at home, in my neighborhood, at school, at college; work, in social situations (parties/events)"; "psychological (offenses, threats, exclusion, body perception, racism, sexism, LGBTQIA+-phobia, etc.), physical (aggressions), sexual (harassment and/or abuse), others."

Statistical analysis
The statistical analyses were performed with the Statistical Pack-

Sample
The

Individual questionnaires
Shapiro-Wilk tests showed that both GELOPH < 15 > (W = 0.97, p > 0.05) and STAI-T scores (W = 0.96, p = 0.05) have a normal distribution. Thus, we used mean and standard deviation to characterize the variables.

Paired analyses
3.3.1 STAI and GELOPH < 15 > Since both distributions do not have outliers, we expect these parameters to not affect the size of the correlations between STAI-T and GELOPH < 15 > scores ). There is a strong positive correlation between GELOPH < 15 > and STAI-T scores (r (65) = 0.667, p < 0.001). A simple linear regression was calculated to predict the GELOPH < 15 > scores based on STAI-T scores. A significant regression equation was found (F (1, 63) = 50.4, p < 0.001, R 2 = 0.445). Participants' GELOPH < 15 > scores increased 0.042 to each F I G U R E 1 Scatter plot depicting the association between STAI and GELOPH < 15 > scores. The vertical line represents the Brazilian STAI population average (46); the horizontal line represents the cut-off point of GELOPH < 15 > (2.5).

F I G U R E 2
Relationship between bullying experience, STAI-T, and GELOPH < 15 > scores.
STAI-T score increase. All subjects with gelotophobia were also above the Brazilian population average for anxiety (Ruch & Proyer, 2008) (see Figure 1).

STAI and bullying
There was no significant correlation between STAI-T scores and bullying ( (65) = 0.199, p > 0.05). Figure 2 shows the distribution of individual STAI-T and GELOPH < 15 > scores according to bullying experience. However, of the 56 participants with STAI-T scores above 46 (Brazilian average, see (Ruch & Proyer, 2008)), 45(80.36%) stated that they had been bullied while only 7(12.5%) were unable to confirm it and 4(7.14%) claimed not to have been bullied.

DISCUSSION
The majority (60%) of subjects in our sample were gelotophobes, with an average GELOPH < 15 > score of 2.69(0.08), higher than the average score (mean = 1.67, SD = 0.52) reported in a previous study ) including a Brazilian sample (N = 211) (mean age = 37.2, SD = 13.9). Different from that earlier study, however, we targeted college students who self-identified as anxious and found a strong positive correlation between GELOPH < 15 > and STAI-T scores. This finding reinforces the robust relationship patterns between anxiety and the fear of being laughed at reported in previous studies (Havranek et al., 2017;Carretero-Dios et al., 2010;Torres-Marín et al., 2021). Even though GELOPH < 15 > and STAI-T scores were strongly correlated in our study, there was a large proportion of anxious subjects who were not gelotophobes (30.35%) (Figure 1). This result supports the findings from previous studies (Gelotophobia, 2009;Edwards et al., 2010;Carretero-Dios et al., 2010) proposing the fear of being laughed at cannot fully be accounted for by anxiety measures and thus should be considered different constructs.
Gelotophobia seems to be associated with traumatic experiences of being ridiculed during childhood and adolescence, making gelotophobes deeply afraid of being exposed to shame-inducing situations ). Previous studies have reported an association between bullying/teasing and gelotophobia Edwards et al., 2010;Führ, 2010;Platt, 2021;Proyer et al., 2013Proyer et al., , 2011. In our study, though we found no significant correlation between gelotophobia and bullying in college students, the great majority of subjects with gelotophobia reported been previously bullied.
The present study is the first focusing specifically on gelotophobia in undergraduate students in Brazil. Previous studies had shown a large rate of anxiety complaints by those students (Fonaprace-fórum nacional de pró-reitores de assuntos comunitários e estudantis. 2014; Brenneisen Mayer et al., 2016). Given that gelotophobia is a relatively new concept and shares traits with other conditions associated with the introverted neurotic personality type, such as SAD, and our own results, we expect the fear of being laughed at could be highly prevalent in higher education throughout Brazil.
The cross-cultural underpinnings of gelotophobia have been the focus of relatively few studies (Lampert et al., 2010;Proyer et al., 2009). The study by Proyer et al. (2009)