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

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 mem-ories (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 gelo-tophobia is unrelated to laughter-related FM in the DRM paradigm (d <= 0.10) and that FM do not account for gelotophobes' memories of ridicule.