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There is no single cause of fear of clowns established by the available study. In a 2023 questionnaire, people who said they were afraid of clowns most often pointed to difficulty reading a clown’s emotions, sinister media portrayals, unpredictable behavior, and an uncanny appearance. The findings describe what respondents believed might explain their fear; they do not prove what caused it.
What the researchers asked
Philip John Tyson, Shakiela K. Davies, Sophie Scorey, and William James Greville published “Fear of clowns: An investigation into the aetiology of coulrophobia” in Frontiers in Psychology on February 2, 2023. They developed and piloted the Origins of Fear of Clowns Questionnaire (OFCQ), a self-report survey covering eight proposed explanations. It was an exploratory effort to investigate perceived origins, not an experiment designed to establish a cause.
The wider online survey included 987 adults recruited through snowball sampling and distributed through the University of South Wales and social media. The researchers analyzed responses from 528 people who reported being at least somewhat afraid of clowns. Those respondents came from 52 countries, but most were born in the UK; 85% were female, and ages ranged from 18 to 72. Self-selection and the sample’s sex imbalance limit how confidently the results apply to people generally.
Which explanations respondents endorsed most
The strongest agreement concerned the difficulty of interpreting a clown’s emotional signals. Makeup can conceal ordinary facial cues, while exaggerated features may make expression and intent harder to read. The questionnaire captures respondents’ views about their fear; it does not establish that makeup itself causes fear.
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Negative portrayals in popular culture ranked next. The paper discusses horror figures such as Pennywise in It and the Joker as cultural context. These examples help explain why sinister clowns may be familiar, but the survey did not show that watching such characters causes a person to fear clowns.
Respondents also endorsed unpredictability and an uncanny appearance. A performer’s unusual behavior may compound uncertainty about what they intend. The authors discuss possible appearance-related explanations, including exaggerated features and face-paint patterns that may evoke illness or death. These remain hypotheses under investigation; the paper notes that the uncanny-valley explanation had not previously been tested directly for clowns.
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Why a frightening encounter was not the leading explanation
Direct frightening experiences with a clown received the least agreement among the proposed origins. The authors write, “Fear derived from personal experience was not one of our main findings.” In this sample, that result suggests that a simple account in which fear usually begins with one bad encounter is inadequate. It does not mean that a personal experience can never contribute.
Respondents also endorsed direct threat, disgust or avoidance, and modeled fear to varying degrees. Taken together, the ratings are consistent with several possible contributors rather than one universal explanation. Because people were asked retrospectively to rate proposed origins, the results cannot determine how these factors interact or which came first.
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What the survey does—and does not—say about how common the fear is
The 528 respondents reporting some degree of fear were 53.5% of the 987-person survey sample. That is a result within this online sample, not an estimate of the settled prevalence of clinical coulrophobia. The paper also cites other adult estimates—17%, 5.6%, and 1.5%—from studies using different samples and definitions. Those figures are not directly interchangeable: mild apprehension, severe impairment, and a clinical diagnosis are distinct measures.
In particular, the OFCQ study did not assess whether respondents met diagnostic criteria. The authors note that coulrophobia is not explicitly identified as a specific phobia in DSM-5. A person can feel uneasy around clowns without having a clinical phobia.
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Why the findings are preliminary
The questionnaire records self-reported explanations from people who already described themselves as at least somewhat afraid. It cannot show that a proposed factor caused the fear, and the self-selected, predominantly female, mostly UK-born sample may not represent other populations. The study also does not provide a treatment protocol.
The authors call for research using more balanced samples, examining how fear severity relates to proposed origins, and experimentally testing the effects of makeup and facial features. They also identify a possible connection with adverse childhood experiences as a question for further investigation—not a conclusion of this survey.
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