The current study examines whether the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) can be assessed reliably and validly by means of a self-report instrument in di¤erent countries of the world. All items of the GELOPH 254 R. T. Proyer et al. (Ruch and Titze 1998;Ruch and Proyer 2008b) were translated to the local language of the collaborator (42 languages in total). In total, 22,610 participants in 93 samples from 73 countries completed the GELOPH. Across all samples the reliability of the 15-item questionnaire was high (mean alpha of .85) and in all samples the scales appeared to be unidimensional. The endorsement rates for the items ranged from 1.31% through 80.00% to a single item. Variations in the mean scores of the items were more strongly related to the culture in a country and not to the language in which the data were collected. This was also supported by a multidimensional scaling analysis with standardized mean scores of the items from the GELOPH3154. This analysis identified two dimensions that further helped explaining the data (i.e., insecure vs. intense avoidant-restrictive and low vs. high suspicious tendencies towards the laughter of others). Furthermore, multiple samples derived from one country tended to be (with a few exceptions) highly similar. The study shows that gelotophobia can be assessed reliably by means of a self-report instrument in cross-cultural research. This study enables further studies of the fear of being laughed at with regard to di¤erences in the prevalence and putative causes of gelotophobia in comparisons to di¤erent cultures.

The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a Questionnaire of Occupational Humorous Coping (QOHC), partly based on the model of emotion regulation by Gross (Current Directions in Psychological Science 10: 214–219, 2001). Items intended to measure antecedent-focused, response-focused, and affiliative and aggressive-manipulative humorous coping methods were generated. Preliminary studies led to improvements in the questionnaire and to the removal of items controlling for acquiescence bias. Principal axis factoring with oblique rotation on a large sample yielded four stable and reliable factors: an antecedent-focused, a response-focused, an aggressive-manipulative and an affiliative instrumental humorous coping factor. Convergent and discriminant validity with existing humorous coping and other sense of humor measures (the CHS, the MSHS and the HSQ) was satisfactory, but not always in the expected direction. Antecedent-focused and generic humorous coping (CHS) were weakly associated with job-related positive affect and well-being; for the self-enhancing humor style these associations were moderate. Aggressive-manipulative, response-focused and generic humorous coping (CHS) showed weak associations with negative job-related affect. The findings are explained in terms of assessment issues and possible moderating effects of humorous coping.

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Stress and coping theory, Humorous coping, Facet analysis, Mapping sentence, Health-related assessment,

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