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The attentional bias of gelotophobes towards emotion words containing the Chinese character for ‘laugh’: An eye-tracking approach

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Abstract

Gelotophobes are typically characterized by the fear of laughter, social withdrawal, and humorlessness, possibly related to negative experiences of being laughed at in the past. The present study seeks to expand our understanding of gelotophobia through a relatively novel approach: using eye-tracking to investigate the attentional bias of gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes towards negative emotion words that do and do not contain the Chinese character for “laugh,” by comparing responses to negative ridicule words (RID), negative contempt words (CONT), positive pleasure words (PLE) and neutral words (NEU). Results of the start time of the first run of fixations showed that gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes both focused on negative words before other words. Gelotophobes’ attentional bias towards RID and CONT was greater than that of non-gelotophobes in first gaze duration, percentage of total viewing duration, total fixation count, and run count, suggesting that gelotophobes had greater difficulty in disengaging their attention from negative to neutral words. Non-gelotophobes’ attentional bias, however, towards negative ridicule neutral words (RID-NEU) and negative contempt neutral words (CONT-NEU) was greater than that of gelotophobes, suggesting that non-gelotophobes were more able to shift attention from negative to neutral words. Moreover, gelotophobes paid significantly more attention to RID than CONT, suggesting that gelotophobes displayed a longer and stronger attentional bias towards RID (containing the “laugh” character). Interestingly, there was no difference for PLE between gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes. The present study contributes to our understanding of the attentional bias of gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes towards emotion words.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Cognitive and Human Affective Neuroscience Laboratory (CHAN Lab), National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan. The study was supported by the Yin Shu-Tien Educational Foundation. This work was also financially supported by a grant (MOST-108-2634-F-002-022) from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, and by the “Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences” and the “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), from the Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project of the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Learning Sciences and Technologies, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Yen-Lin Lee

  2. Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsueh-Chih Chen

  3. Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsueh-Chih Chen

  4. Chinese Language and Technology Center, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsueh-Chih Chen

  5. MOST AI Biomedical Research Center, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsueh-Chih Chen

  6. Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Sec. 2, Kuang Fu Road, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan

    Yu-Chen Chan

  7. Cognitive and Human Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, CHAN Lab, NTHU, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Yu-Chen Chan

  8. Research Center for Education and Mind Sciences, NTHU, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Yu-Chen Chan

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  1. Yen-Lin Lee
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Correspondence to Yu-Chen Chan.

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Lee, YL., Chen, HC. & Chan, YC. The attentional bias of gelotophobes towards emotion words containing the Chinese character for ‘laugh’: An eye-tracking approach. Curr Psychol 42, 16330–16343 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00563-9

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