Gambling Studies

This article describes the development of the Massachusetts Gambling Screen (MAGS). The purpose of the MAGS is to provide a brief clinical screening instrument that can (1) yield an index of non-pathological and pathological gambling during a 5 to 10 minute survey or interview and (2) document the first psychometric translation of the proposed DSM-IV pathological gambling criteria into a set of survey or clinical interview questions. The development data for this instrument were obtained from a survey of 856 adolescents who were students in suburban Boston high schools. The results provided evidence that weighted item scores (i.e., discriminant function coefficients) could correctly classify 96% of adolescent gamblers as pathological, in transition or non-pathological when DSM-IV criteria were employed as the conceptual referent. The results also describe the prevalence of a variety of social and emotional problems associated with adolescent gambling. Finally, the discussion examined the normalization and contemporary social context of gaming and the impact of these influences on the measurement and identification of pathological gambling.

Acknowledgments This literature review was completed on behalf of circa (Cultural & Indigenous Research Centre Australia) to guide a Review of the In-Language Gambler's Help Services. Feedback and comments provided to guide the review from circa are greatly appreciated.
Funding for this study was provided by the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation: ‘Review of the In-Language Gambler’s Help Services’. The VRGF had no role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication.

This article explores the emergence and significance of printed game boards in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. These objects constitute an important and overlooked visual and material aspect of a pervasive culture of gaming that engrossed a huge range of the populace: both the rich and the poor, men and women, the educated and the illiterate. Printed game boards not only served to entertain, but also mirrored and reified deeper social and moral concerns about gambling and leisure, a tension between the prescribed morality of the legal sanctions, decrees, and censures associated with the Counter-Reformation, and the everyday games common both in courtly leisure and play on the street and in the tavern. Visually manifesting a dual understanding of games as both ludic and mimetic, printed game boards enacted the ontology of life’s journey for early modern players, from the courtly, to the religious, to the quotidian.

This paper examines the public policy value of looking at gambling from a public health perspective. The manner in which social issues are framed will either expand or curtail public policy debates. The existing and traditional frames for gambling (e.g. gambling as a matter of individual freedom, gambling as a form of recreation) fail to consider research on the social and economic impacts of gambling. Because a public health frame offers a broad viewpoint of society, it encompasses a number of social and economic impacts not considered in traditional frames. However, the existing gambling frames enjoy varying degrees of cultural, economic, and political support and, as a result, creating a higher profile for a public health framework will encounter a number of barriers. Research can play a decisive role in overcoming these barriers, as it has in a number of related fields (e.g., tobacco use, addiction and product liability, the epidemiology of AIDS). The paper concludes that research that identifies and quantifies the public health factors of gambling will substantially contribute to a public shift toward a public health frame.

This paper examines how the casino industry was transformed by slot technology between 1950 and 1990. The criminalization of slot machines in the 1950s led to their massive evacuation into Las Vegas casinos. In this concentrated environment, slot machines revealed to casino operators an automated surveillance technology that could disassemble the player into streams of virtual data, not through any overt means, but through the very activity of play itself. Slot managers and gaming technologists found themselves empowered professionally as they experimented with ways to transform data into profits. From the 1970s to the 90s, this technological development effectively linked up every economic activity in various casinos across the US, creating a virtual network that defeated the geographical injunctions designed to segregate gambling from other spheres of life.

We conduct a lottery experiment to assess the predictive importance of simple choice process metrics (SCPMs) in forecasting risky 50/50 gambling decisions using different types of machine learning algorithms
as well as traditional choice modeling approaches. The SCPMs are recorded during a fixed pre-decision phase and are derived from tracking subjects’ eye movements, pupil sizes, skin conductance, and cardiovascular and respiratory signals. Our study demonstrates that SCPMs provide relevant information for predicting gambling decisions, but we do not find forecasting accuracy to be substantially affected by adding SCPMs to standard choice data. Instead, our results show that forecasting accuracy highly depends on differences in subject-specific risk preferences and is largely driven by including information on lottery design variables. As a key result, we find evidence for dynamic changes in the predictive importance of psychophysiological responses that appear to be linked to habituation and resource-depletion effects. Subjects’ willingness to gamble and choice-revealing arousal signals both decrease as the experiment progresses. Moreover, our findings
highlight the importance of accounting for previous lottery payoff characteristics when investigating the role of emotions and cognitive bias in repeated decision-making scenarios.

This study investigated the relationship between aversive conditioning, heart rate variability suppression, behavioral activation system/behavioral inhibition system and risk-avoidance on the Iowa gambling task (IGT) in a nonclinical sample (29 male, 29 female, mean age = 20.7). A laboratory based Pavlovian aversive conditioning paradigm was used where a 1500 Hz tone (CS?) was followed by a burst of loud white noise (US), and a 850 Hz (CS-) tone was never followed by the US. In a subsequent extinction phase where the CS? and CS-were presented without the US, conditioned skin conductance responses to the CS? indicated aversive conditioning. The results showed that the participants who did not show aversive conditioning (N = 26) exhibited significantly less risk-avoidance compared to participants who did show aversive conditioning (N = 32). Regression analysis showed that among the study variables, only aversive conditioning contributed significantly to explaining variance in risk-avoidance. These results may have implications for understanding risk-taking in gambling in general, and may be a starting point understanding the role of aversive conditioning in the development and maintenance of gambling problems.

Poor South Africans are significantly poorer and have lower employment rates than the subjects of most published research on gambling prevalence and problem gambling. Some existing work suggests relationships between gambling activity (including severity of risk for problem gambling), income, employment status and casino proximity. The objective of the study reported here is to establish the prevalence of gambling, including at risk and pathological gambling, and the profile of gambling activities in two samples of poor South

Goal This analysis was undertaken to assess the demographic and mental health characteristics of ''normal'' or non-problem gamblers versus non-gamblers in a representative community sample. Sample Study participants consisted of 557 North Central American Indian veterans. Data collection included a demographic and trauma questionnaire, a computer-based Diagnostic Interview Schedule for DSM-III-R, and a treatment history algorithm. Findings Univariate analyses revealed that gamblers had greater social competence (i.e., higher education, living with a spouse) and higher lifetime psychiatric morbidity. Binary regression analysis revealed that, compared to non-gamblers, J. Westermeyer Á P. Thuras Minneapolis VAMC, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Background and aims: Loneliness and a low sense of mastery are associated with excessive gambling, but the underlying processes of these relationships remain unstudied. Because psychological distress can increase vulnerability to excessive gambling, we investigated its mediating role in these relationships among young people. To meet the need for cross-country research, we also observed how these relationships occur in four countries with different cultures. Design, setting, and participants: Demographically balanced cross-sectional survey data were collected from 15–25-year- olds in Finland (n = 1200; 50% male), the United States (n = 1212; 49.8% male), South Korea (n = 1192; 49.6% male), and Spain (n = 1212; 51.2% male). Measurements: Excessive gambling was measured with the South Oaks Gambling Screen, psychological distress was assessed with the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, loneliness was measured with the three-item Loneliness Scale, and low sense of mastery was assesse...

In the last few years, gambling and betting opportunities have been increasing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading to an increase in  pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is considered by experts to be an instinct control disorder, i.e. the inability to refrain from an instinct that at the same time causes pleasure to a person, but is also dangerous for them and the people around them as it seriously disrupts not only the physical, emotional, mental and material state of the individual, but affects their families and friends also. In order to examine the most common forms of gambling and betting as well as socio-demographic aspects and their characteristics among Bosniaks in BiH, in the period April-May 2019, on a sample of N = 1520 respondents, a survey was conducted in 62 municipalities in BiH. Respondents ranged from 18-77 years old, of whom 568 were women and 927 were men. While defining the sample for the purposes of this research, a two-stage stratification was performed, namely: stratification at the administrative level of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the type of settlement, respecting the principle of proportional representation of municipalities within entity/cantons. Data was collected via a structured face-to-face interviews with closed questions to which handwritten answers were given. The data collection was done through the Network of Youth and Directorate for Religious Affairs of the Riyasat of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results suggest persisting differences in the perception of the most common forms of gambling and betting, where bingo, disposable lottery tickets/scrapers, lotto and sports betting are perceived to be the most common. The most widespread types of gambling are influenced by the socio-demographic variables such as gender, place of residence, level of education, age and monthly household income.

Objective To compare gambling behaviors in a random sample of community residents with and without mental disorders identified by the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI). Method A large national community survey conducted by Statistics Canada included questions about problems arising from gambling activities as per the Canadian Problem Gambling Index (CPGI). We compared respondents within three gambling severity categories (non-problem, low severity and moderate/high severity gambling) across three diagnostic groupings (mood/anxiety disorders, substance dependence/harmful alcohol use, no selected psychiatric disorder). Results Of the 14,934 respondents age 18-64 years who engaged in at least one type of gambling activity in the previous 12 months, 5.8% fell in the low severity gambling category while 2.9% fell in the moderate/high severity category. Females accounted for 51.7% of the sample. The risk of moderate/high severity gambling was 1.7 times higher in persons with mood or anxiety disorder compared to persons with no selected disorder. For persons with substance dependence or harmful alcohol use, the risk of moderate/high severity gambling was 2.9 times higher. Persons with both mood/anxiety and substance/ alcohol disorders were five times more likely to be moderate/high severity gamblers. The odds ratio for females was 0.6 and for those with less than post-secondary education it was 1.52. Differences in age and personal income were not significant.

Zusammenfassung: Pathologisches Glücksspielen stellt sowohl ein schwerwiegendes individuelles psychopathologisches Syndrom als auch ein ernstes gesellschaftliches Problem dar. Der SOGS und die PG-YBOCS sind testtheoretisch evaluierte, weit verbreitete und führende Messinstrumente pathologischen Glückspiels, die jeweils im amerikanischen Kontext und in englischer Sprache entwickelt wurden. Um diese wichtigen Instrumente auch im deutschsprachigen Raum klinisch und wissenschaftlich zu nutzen, werden im vorliegendem Artikel jeweils deutsche Übersetzungen vorgestellt. Im Vergleich zu den amerikanischen Originalen erlauben die überarbeiteten deutschen Versionen außerdem eine zeitlich differenzierte Datenerhebung, aus der zusätzlich wichtige Informationen bezüglich möglicher Veränderungen erfasst werden können. Summary Pathological gambling constitutes both a highly debilitating psychopathological condition for individuals and a serious problem for society at large. The SOGS and the PG-YBOCS are validated, widely used and leading psychometric measures of pathological gambling. Both were developped in the United States and are hence in English language. The current paper introduces translations of these important measures in order to facilitate their clinical and scientific use within the German-language community. In contrast to the American originals, the revised German translations allow for the assessment of important additional information regarding possible changes in pathological gambling symptoms over time.

Objective. We studied the prevalences of video game use (VGU) and addiction (VGA) in gambling disorder (GD) patients and compared them with subjects with non-video game use (non-VGU) in relation to their gambling behavior, psychopathology, and personality characteristics.Method. A sample of 193 GD patients (121 non-VGU, 43 VGU, and 29 VGA) consecutively admitted to our pathological gambling unit participated in the study.Assessment. Measures included the video game dependency test (VDT), symptom checklist-90-revised, and the temperament and character inventory-revised, as well as a number of other GD indices.Results. In GD, the observed prevalence of VG (use or addiction) was 37.3% (95% CI:30.7%÷44.3),VGU 22.3% (95% CI:17.0%÷28.7), and VGA 15% (95% CI:10.7%÷20.7). Orthogonal polynomial contrast into logistic regression showed positive linear trends for VG level and GD severity and other measures of general psychopathology. After structural equation modeling, higher VG total scores w...

Flusty, Steven & Pauliina Raento (2010). Imagineered worlds: The design  of Las Vegas resort-casinos. In Rappaport, N., B. Denison & N. Hanna (eds.): Learning in Las Vegas: Charles Atwood/David M. Schwartz, 52–71. Yale School of Architecture, New Haven & W. W. Norton, New York.

Introduction

The aim of the review is to present the complexity of issues related to treatment of gambling disorders, including definition of gambling and diagnostic criteria, the coexistence of gambling disorders and other disorders, epidemiology of the phenomenon, the prevalence of help seeking, the therapeutic offer for gamblers and its effectiveness, motivations and barriers to treatment.
Material and method

The review of the literature was conducted using the MEDLINE database and Google Scholar. Two general search terms: “gambling” and “treatment” were used, and exploration was limited to 2000–2014. A total number of 96 publications were included in the review.
Results

The legalisation of gambling contributed to a growth in the social acceptance for this type of behaviour. Gambling disorders are often associated with mental disorders (mood, neurotic and personality disorders), and psychoactive substance dependence. The vast majority of gamblers do not seek treatment and about one third of them recover without professional help. Among those who decided on treatment, participation in the Gamblers Anonymous meetings is the most preferred form. Cognitive behavioural therapy, brief interventions and controlled gambling are effective forms of treatment as confirmed by evaluation studies. Gamblers decide to take treatment mainly for economic reasons or because of concerns about their mental and physical health. Barriers to treatment are primarily gamblers’ beliefs that they can solve their problems themselves, shame, fear of stigma, lack of information on what the treatment is and doubts about its effectiveness and quality.

One of the most basic structural characteristics that may determine whether someone gambles on a particular type of game in the first place is the size of the jackpot that a game has to offer. This article briefly examines what the scientific and empirical literature says about winning large amounts of money from gambling. It also briefly examines the role of probability and event frequency in gambling and their implications when combined in relation to winning money. Most of the research in this area has been carried out on lottery gambling as this form of gambling tends to have the largest jackpots. However, there is no reason to assume that these general findings should not be any different in other types of gambling such as winning a million dollars on a slot machine.

Many mining and development experts consider artisanal diamond mining to be a form of gambling. In Sierra Leone’s mining areas, this comparison also recurs occasionally in miners’ discourses. However, the idea that mining is like gambling deserves critical scrutiny as it allows only a limited, stereotypical representation of this work. This article considers mining as a complex combination of material production and imaginaries oriented by a specific ethic. Central to the understanding of this ethic is a repertoire of religious metaphors that inform miners’ working and ritual practices.
By drawing upon my ethnographic experience in Sierra Leone (2007–2011), I examine the vocabulary of contingency which the miners use to make sense of their successes and failures and guide their daily decision-making. Moreover, I show how this vocabulary mirrors the daily efforts  of miners in (re)producing the social reality in and around diamond mines. What I mean to  highlight is the ways in which diamond miners challenge dominant discourses depicting them as immoral, antisocial agents.

In 2019, a questionnaire was conducted among foreigners living in the Czech Republic focused on gambling, in which 110 respondents from Vietnam and 80 respondents from Ukraine answered. Firstly, the Attitudes towards gambling scale (ATGS-8) was used to discover respondents’ attitudes to gambling. Secondly, their experience with gambling was examined with the help of the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) which allowed, among others, to estimate the level of prevalence of problem gambling in these groups. The methods used allowed us to compare both the Ukrainians to Vietnamese as well as Ukrainians and Vietnamese to Czechs, as similar survey was conducted among the major population of the country in 2017. The overall score of attitudes to gambling is slightly higher for the citizens of Ukraine (17.97) and Vietnam (18.29) compared to the majority. The Vietnamese living in the Czech Republic also have a significantly higher proportion of people in the category of pathological gambl...

There have been several recent lawsuits in which problem gamblers (or those affected by problem gambling) have sued casinos or other gaming companies for damages relating to bankruptcies, suicides, and other negative consequences of compulsive gambling. Although the legal cases have been decided in favor of the gaming companies, it can seem as though there is a moral residue in some of these cases: perhaps some of the actions of the gaming companies, though legal, have been morally problematic. This case invites students to explore this possibility by introducing them to the facts surrounding the lawsuits and highlighting some of the most salient moral considerations. Students will also be asked to reflect on the public policy implications, if any, of their findings.

Gambling in Macau was liberalised in 2002, when the People’s Republic of China was also campaigning for the city to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2005, while the opening of new monumental casino venues began to critically transform the cityscape, Macau’s Historic Centre became China’s 31st World Heritage site. In this chapter, I examine how the expansion of gambling and global recognition of the city’s heritage have generated urban and political ambivalences stemming from the intersections of global capitalism, identity formation, and development, despite new regulations and coordinated efforts across the fields of urban planning, heritage preservation, and land use. I analyse how China’s national program for Macau has entailed both the regeneration of gambling as a powerful regional industry and the ‘essentialisation’ of heritage, showing that the attendant processes of city-making and urbanism have continued to allow flexibility and improvisation under the pressures of tourism promotion.

New Jersey was the first state to legalize sports gaming outside of Nevada after a landmark US Supreme Court decision in May 2018 struck down a federal law banning sports gambling in all other states and the District of Columbia (Liptak and Draper 2018). Some race tracks such as Monmouth Park race track began offering sports gambling as a way to bring back fans to parimutuel wagering which had been and still is in decline for several decades at tracks throughout the nation (Associated Press 2019). This brief paper examines trends in New Jersey on how sports gambling has grown when compared to parimutuel wagering and casino revenues in the state since mid-2018. It appears initially that sports gambling has failed to bring in any resurgence in parimutuel wagering in the state as casino revenues have flat-lined. These trends also existed before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Background and aims Loneliness and a low sense of mastery have been associated with excessive gambling, but the underlying processes of these relationships remain unstudied. Because psychological distress can increase vulnerability to excessive gambling, we investigated its mediating role in these relationships among young people. To meet the need for cross-country research, we also observed how these relationships occur in four countries with different cultures. Design, setting and participants Demographically balanced cross-sectional survey data were collected for 15–25-year-olds in Finland (n=1200; 50% male), the United States (n=1212; 49.8% male), South Korea (n=1192; 49.6% male) and Spain (n=1212; 51.2% male). Measurements Excessive gambling was measured with the South Oaks Gambling Screen, psychological distress was assessed with the 12-Item General Health Questionnaire, loneliness was measured with the Three-Item Loneliness Scale and low sense of mastery was assessed with the...

The present study informs understanding of customer segmentation strategies by extending Twedt's heavy-half propositions to include a segment of users that represent less than two percent of all households -consumers demonstrating extremely frequent behavior (EFB).

“All Bets in? - A Case Examining Charitable Gaming in North Dakota (USA), The Birth of a New Gaming Site, and the Outside Influences that Help Shape the Gaming Industry in North Dakota, USA”, Invertis Journal of Management, Volume 1, Number 1, July – December, 2009, pp. 73 – 89, ISSN: 0975-6310. (With Melissa D. Regalado, and James Ondracek)

Internet gambling is growing rapidly, as is concern about its possible effect on the public’s health. This paper reports the results of the first prospective longitudinal study of actual Internet sports gambling behavior during eight study months. Data include recorded fixed-odds bets on the outcome of sporting contests and live-action bets on the outcome of events within contests for 40,499 Internet sports gambling service subscribers who enrolled during February 2005. We tracked the following primary gambling behaviors: daily totals of the number of bets made, money bet, and money won. We transformed these variables into measures of gambling involvement. We analyzed behavior for both fixed-odds and live-action bets. The median betting behavior of the 39,719 fixed-odds bettors was to place 2.5 bets of €4 (approximately $5.3 US) every fourth day during the median 4 months from first to last bet. This typical pattern incurred a loss of 29% of the amount wagered. The median betting behavior of the 24,794 live-action bettors was to place 2.8 wagers of €4 every fourth day during the median duration of 6 weeks at a loss of 18% of the amount wagered. We also examined the behavior of empirically determined groups of heavily involved bettors whose activity exceeded that of 99% of the sample.

The purpose of this study was to use a meta-analytic procedure to synthesize the rates of disordered gambling for college students that have been reported in the research literature. In order to identify all possible studies that met stringent inclusion criteria, Medline, PsychINFO, and SocioIndex databases were searched with the terms ''gambling,'' and ''college student''. This process resulted in 15 studies concerning gambling among college students that were published through July 2005. To synthesize the 15 studies, a random effects model for meta-analysis was applied. The estimated proportion of disordered gamblers among college students was 7.89%. This estimate is noteworthy because it is higher than that reported for adolescents, college students or adults in a previous study using meta-analytic procedures with studies conducted prior to 1997.

An implementation and one-year follow-up of the Gambling Decisions program attempted to answer several important questions. First, is controlled gambling a viable treatment option for some gamblers? Can earlier stage problem gamblers be separated for treatment from those with more severe problems? Finally, would problem gamblers utilize a community health agency for treatment of their excessive gambling? A pretest/posttest design was chosen where the efficacy of the program was assessed using repeated measures ANOVA analysis. Results showed that an average loss of $608 over a 4-week period was reduced to $113 immediately after the 6-week program and to a loss of $73 at 12 months. The average number of hours spent gambling per 4 weeks was significantly reduced from 23.5 at pretest to 6.5 at the 12 month posttest. Significant decreases were also observed in the number of days per week that clients gambled, and clients reported significant reductions in everyday life problems related t...

The study aimed to strengthen the scarce literature on self-help treatments for Problem Gambling (PG) by comparing the effectiveness of a Self-Help Cognitive Behavioral Treatment (SHCBT) program (n = 23) with a 6-week Waitlist condition (n = 32) in problem gamblers. Participants were community volunteers with gambling problems and were randomly allocated to the Waitlist and treatment conditions. Results showed significant improvements at post-treatment in gambling behaviors including frequency of gambling, average amount gambled per day and PG symptoms as well as a number of gambling correlates including psychological states (e.g., depression, anxiety and stress), gambling cognitions, gambling urges, gambling related self-efficacy, satisfaction with life, and quality of life among those who completed the SHCBT program, when compared with the waitlist condition. The effect size (partial g 2 ) ranged from .25 to .57 for all assessed outcomes that showed significant improvement from pre-to post-treatment. It was concluded that a self-help CBT program can be beneficial for treating community problem gamblers.

Studies attempting to identify the specific 'addictive' features of electronic gaming machines (EGMs) have yielded largely inconclusive results, suggesting that it is the interaction between a gambler's cognitions and the machine, rather than the machine itself, which fuels excessive play. Research has reported that machine players with gambling problems adopt a number of erroneous cognitive perceptions regarding the probability of winning and the nature of randomness. What is unknown, however, is whether motivations for gambling and attitudes toward pre-session monetary limit-setting vary across levels of gambling severity, and whether proposed precommitment strategies would be useful in minimizing excessive gambling expenditures. The current study explored these concepts in a sample of 127 adults, ages 18 to 81, attending one of four gambling venues in Queensland, Australia. The study found that problem gamblers were more likely than other gamblers to play machines to earn income or escape their problems rather than for fun and enjoyment. Similarly, they were less likely to endorse any type of monetary limit-setting prior to play. They were also reticent to adopt the use of a 'smart card' or other strategy to limit access to money during a session, though they indicated they lost track of money while gambling and were rarely aware of whether they were winning or losing during play. Implications for precommitment policies and further research are discussed.

Over the last decade, there appears to have been a marked shift in gamblers wanting instant 24/7 gratification when they bet or gamble. They also want to be able to gamble instantly on anything of their desire, so gaming operators have to have a vast array of games and markets on which the gambler can bet. They also want to be paid their winnings instantly too (i.e., immediately after the result or outcome is known). Technological developments such as cloud computing mean that instantaneous gambling by (and for) the masses is now a reality. Live betting is going to become a critical activity in the success of the future online and mobile gambling markets. It is already showing that it can be a major revenue generator for anyone in the sports betting market (in for any company in the sports betting market, it is quickly turning from a betting option to a betting necessity). It also means that gaming companies are having to outsource much of their trading and event generation.

The field of gambling is not immune to the technological revolution taking place elsewhere in other fields. These new technologies may provide many people with their first exposure to the world of gambling and could be argued to be more enticing than previous non-technological incarnations. The long term impact of the technological revolution in the gambling field cannot yet be assessed but I like other academics studying the impact of gambling on people's everyday lives will be monitoring the situation with great interest.