Gelotophobia

Gelotophobia is a fear of being laughed at and is treated as a type of social phobia. Most people dislike being laughed at, but the German psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Michael Titze found in his clinical observations in the mid 1990s that some patients were primarily worried about it. They tended to scan their surroundings for signs of laughter and ridicule and felt that they themselves seemed ridiculous. Titze also saw a characteristic movement pattern in them when they believed they were being laughed at, awkward and wooden like a puppet, and he described the state as the Pinocchio syndrome.