[7] The sociologist Christie Davies predicts a higher prevalence of gelotophobia in hierarchically organized societies where the main means of social control is shame.
[8] Research into gelotophobia using the GELOPH scales shows that empirically, the condition exists outside of people who seek therapy due to experiencing a problematic fear of being laughed at.
In the first studies, gelotophobes were distinguished from other people with shame-based problems and non-shame based neurotics and samples of a normal population.
[6] Basically, this means that even though gelotophobia shares similar problems, high scores were also found for these criteria in individuals with Asperger's syndrome and Cluster A personality disorders.
[13] Gelotophobes do not have the ability to understand the difference between playful teasing and crueller forms such as bullying ridicule.
Gelotophobia correlates highly with introversion and neuroticism, and on older P-scales, gelotophobes score higher in psychoticism.
[18] Paul Lewis (Boston College, US) speculated whether political gelotophobia might affect elections in the US ("The twin fears of being effectively mocked or ineffective in mocking others [too harsh, blunt, tasteless] led candidates to aggressive and proactive strategies [going on TV to show they can take a joke, be funny—anything to avoid being rendered pathetically ridiculous or inappropriately derisive]") [p. 42, conference abstract from the 2009 conference of the International Society for Humor Studies ISHS Archived 2010-01-11 at the Wayback Machine in Long Beach, California];[19] Sociologist Christie Davies, who is also president of the ISHS, comments satirically on the results of recent elections in the UK.