Abstract
In recent years, increasing attention had been drawn to gelotophobes, who could not distinguish good-humored and bullying-ridicule teasing. Studies regarding attentional bias mainly focused on facial expression and laughter. However, few studies were about emotional words, containing more emotional categories. In addition, previous findings showed that start time of the first run of fixations of both groups with and without social phobia was on negative words, but inconsistent results were found in reaction time and accuracy of dot-probe task. Therefore, the present study aimed at investigating attentional bias of negative emotional words on gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes by eye-tracking for more objective records. The present study could be divided into two experiments and the dot-probe task was adopted. Experiment I explored how emotional words with “laughter” aroused gelotophobes’ and non-gelotophobes’ attentional bias in the condition of ridiculous, mirth and neutral emotional words. Experiment II explored how negative words with/without “laughter” aroused gelotophobes’ and non-gelotophobes’ attentional bias in the condition of ridiculous, despised, cheerful, and neutral emotional words. Together these results of two experiments revealed that the start time of the first run of fixations of both gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes was on negative words, which was consistent with previous studies. Further, gelotophobes had larger percentage of total viewing duration and more total fixation count on negative words. In other words, gelotophobes’ attention was hard to transfer from negative words to neutral words, while non-gelotophobes’ attention transferred from negative words to neutral words. Moreover, Experiment I demonstrated that gelotophobes was hard to transfer from positive and negative words with “laughter” to neutral words, including longer first gaze duration and more total fixation count. Experiment II indicated that gelotophobes’ attention on ridiculous words was significantly more despised words. These results concluded that gelotophobes had more and longer attentional bias on emotional words with “laughter”. The present study suggested that gelotophobes can lower their social anxiety by offering positive and negative laughter as training. Future studies could be conducted by fMRI along with eye-tracking to further investigate gelotophobes’ and non-gelotophobes’ brain mechanism of attentional bias on emotional words with/without “laughter”.