Gambling’s illusion of control makes players believe they have some power to influence random events, leading them to bet more frequently and take greater risks. But it is essential to distinguish between feelings and facts.
Participants reported experiencing numerous negative repercussions as a result of their gambling behaviors, such as financial strain and relationship tension. They also experienced emotional turmoil as their partners’ dishonesty or concealment of gambling issues undermined trust and established ways of living.
The Gambler’s Fallacy
The Gambler’s Fallacy is a cognitive bias in which individuals misperceive that future outcomes are either less likely or more likely due to past outcomes. This error stems from our inherent understanding of randomness, with grave implications for real world scenarios; think stock traders selling off winning positions after an impressive streak, or parents thinking their son has had multiple daughters before now.
Roney and Trick conducted an experiment in which participants chose between betting on either a series of coin flips or two separate blocks of six coin tosses. When three heads came up consecutively in any one block, most participants believed the next flip would likely yield tails even though odds remained at 1 to 1. Similar effects could be seen in other experiments with different sequences and types of bets.
Craving
Gambling addiction can create emotional, personal, and financial hardship. Depression often prompts individuals to engage in riskier activities in an attempt to feel better – creating a vicious cycle with devastating repercussions for one’s life.
Studies have demonstrated that implicit facial expressions influence risky decisions even when their content is irrelevant to decision outcomes (i.e., happiness increases risky choices while anger decreases them). This effect remains consistent across payoff structures, risk operationalizations, time demands and unobtrusive versus suboptimal face presentations.
Empathy has been linked with lower levels of gambling disorder (GD), and both cognitive and emotional empathy has been found to correlate with responsible gambling attitudes. Yet its mechanism remains unknown; research on this subject will help shed light on how emotions interact with gambling behavior while developing methods for objectively measuring emotions during gambling tasks.
Loss-Chasing Behavior
Chasing is a core characteristic of disordered gambling, associated with cognitive demands of recovering losses and poor affect processing systems. Research suggests that chasing can be initiated by perception of risk or any desire to minimize financial loss (Limbrick-Oldfield et al. 2020).
Participant were exposed to a computerized task where they could choose whether or not to place a certain proportion of their available stake on each trial, then receive a monetary reward if they won, according to various winning probabilities. One experiment compared non-alexithymic participants near caseness alexithymic status with low risk problem gamblers to ascertain if loss chasing behavior existed among any group of participants.
Results indicated that participants high in alexithymia tend to wager a greater proportion of the available stake on trials following losses than on wins, with emotional aspects correlating with loss chasing while externally-oriented thinking did not.
Distinguishing Between Feelings and Facts
Feelings are highly subjective and influenced by stress and psychological biases; facts on the other hand are objective and independent from one’s state of mind. Distinguishing between them is key for making rational decisions when gambling; for instance, feelings that one is due for a win could cause them to increase betting and take greater risks even though statistical probabilities of winning remain unchanged.
Although cognitive reappraisal may be useful for some individuals, the results of this study indicate it may not always be effective when used to address gambling disorders. Positive reappraisal appears to actually promote problem gambling by creating a cognitive distortion where gamblers believe they can control their emotions to direct their behaviors – this misperception may stem from its exaggerated effect on corrugator supercilii areas of the brain involved with emotion regulation.