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In the spirit of end-of-the-year highlights lists, the NCRG staff perused the approximately 500 peer-reviewed publications released in 2012 to determine the most noteworthy studies in the field of gambling disorders and addiction.

Narrowing our list of 10 publications was a challenging task. Therefore, we decided to highlight articles that may predict future trends in research. We salute these authors and all of the investigators who are working to understand gambling disorders.

1.DSM-5 – Changes in Diagnosis for Pathological Gambling

The fifth edition of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-5) will delete the current “illegal acts” criterion and reduce the number of criteria required for a diagnosis of pathological gambling from five to four. This study found that DSM-5 criteria performed slightly better than otherDSM-IV-based instruments (Denis, Fatséas, & Auriacombe, 2012).

2.Resistance to Treatment

Nearly 90 percent of people diagnosed with pathological gambling do not seek treatment—and researchers are not sure why that trend occurs. Canadian researchers have taken the lead to figure out what motivates people to seek help (Suurvali, Hodgins, Toneatto, & Cunningham, 2012).

3.Imaging to See What Part of the Brain is Related to Gambling Disorders

The NCRG Center of Excellence in Gambling Research at Yale University conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that found impulsive tendencies may be reflected in diminished activity in part of the brain associated with rewards and may represent a target for the development of treatment for gambling disorders (Balodis et al., 2012).

4.Effectiveness of Therapeutic Interventions for Gambling Disorders

The dearth of randomized control trials (RCT) of treatments for gambling disorders means that RCTs, especially those that test brief interventions, are vital to the field. This study found that two promising approaches led to reduced problems with gambling among the sample of college students (Larimer et al., 2012).

5.Internet Gambling and Corporate Responsibility Interventions

This study examined 10 years of actual Internet gambling behavior of 2,066 gamblers who triggered a responsible gaming alert system at a large international online gaming company (Gray, LaPlante, & Shaffer, 2012). The findings have important implications for designing responsible gaming strategies for the fastest-growing segment of the gaming industry.

6.Toddlers’ Temperament Predicts Later Gambling Problems

Longitudinal studies examining public health issues are important, but these types of studies that follow a group of participants over a period of time are rare in the field of gambling disorders. The 30-year cohort study found that children with “undercontrolled” temperament at three years of age were more than twice as likely to display a gambling disorder at ages 21 and 32 than children who were well-adjusted at age three (Slutske, Moffitt, Poulton, & Caspi, 2012).

7.Predicting Gambling Problems among Minority Youth

Few studies focus on the experience of African-Americans and other minorities with gambling problems. This examination of gambling among urban youth used teacher-provided data to predict the development of gambling problems four to eight years later. The study found that students categorized as highly impulsive by their teachers at ages 11-15 were twice as likely to experience gambling problems by age 19 (Liu et al., 2012).

8.Comparing Pathological Gamblers in Treatment and the Community

This study observed that problem gamblers recruited from treatment centers, versus the larger community for research, are very different. This finding suggests that researchers cannot rely only on disordered gamblers in treatment to understand the disorder (Knezevic & Ledgerwood, 2012).

9.Studying Twin Samples

Using data from a large Australian twin sample, the researchers documented the impact of genetics and the role of personality dimensions in the development of a gambling disorder (Slutske, Cho, Piasecki, & Martin, 2012).

10.Gambling Rats and their Decision-Making Processes

Animal-study researchers have discovered that rats can be used to model human gambling behavior and, therefore, can be used to study decision-making and the effects of various drugs on gambling behaviors. This study used the rodent Iowa Gambling Task to elucidate the effects of drugs on risky choice behavior (Van Enkhuizen, Geyer, & Young, 2012).

REFERENCES

Balodis, I. M., Kober, H., Worhunsky, P. D., Stevens, M. C., Pearlson, G. D., & Potenza, M. N. (2012). Diminished frontostriatal activityduring processing of monetary rewards and losses in pathological gambling.Biological Psychiatry,71(8), 749–757. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2012.01.006

Denis, C., Fatséas, M., & Auriacombe, M. (2012). Analyses related to the development of DSM-5 criteria for substance use related disorders: 3. An assessment of Pathological Gambling criteria.Drug and Alcohol Dependence,122(1-2), 22–27. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2011.09.006

Gray, H. M., LaPlante, D. A., & Shaffer, H. J. (2012). Behavioral characteristics of Internet gamblers who trigger corporate responsible gambling interventions.Psychology of Addictive Behaviors,26(3), 527–535. doi:10.1037/a0028545

Knezevic, B., & Ledgerwood, D. M. (2012). Gambling severity, impulsivity, and psychopathology: comparison of treatment- and community-recruited pathological gamblers.The American Journal on Addictions,21(6), 508–515. doi:10.1111/j.1521-0391.2012.00280.x

Larimer, M. E., Neighbors, C., Lostutter, T. W., Whiteside, U., Cronce, J. M., Kaysen, D., & Walker, D. D. (2012). Brief motivational feedback and cognitive behavioral interventions for prevention of disordered gambling: a randomized clinical trial.Addiction,107(6), 1148–1158. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03776.x

Liu, W., Lee, G. P., Goldweber, A., Petras, H., Storr, C. L., Ialongo, N. S., & Martins, S. S. (2012). Impulsivity trajectories and gambling in adolescence among urban male youth.Addiction. doi:10.1111/add.12049

Slutske, W. S., Cho, S. B., Piasecki, T. M., & Martin, N. G. (2012). Genetic overlap between personality and risk for disordered gambling: Evidence from a national community-based Australian twin study.Journal of Abnormal Psychology. doi:10.1037/a0029999

Slutske, W. S., Moffitt, T. E., Poulton, R., & Caspi, A. (2012). Undercontrolled temperament at age 3 predicts disordered gambling at age 32: a longitudinal study of a complete birth cohort.Psychological Science,23(5), 510–516. doi:10.1177/0956797611429708

Suurvali, H., Hodgins, D. C., Toneatto, T., & Cunningham, J. A. (2012). Motivators for seeking gambling-related treatment among Ontario problem gamblers.Journal of Gambling Studies,28(2), 273–296. doi:10.1007/s10899-011-9268-7

Van Enkhuizen, J., Geyer, M. A., & Young, J. W. (2012). Differential effects of dopamine transporter inhibitors in the rodent Iowa gambling task : Relevance to mania.Psychopharmacology. doi:10.1007/s00213-012-2854-2

NCRG staffResearch Updategambling disordersresearch ethicsTop 10 in 2012

The NCRG on the Road blog series includes posts from NCRG staff members as they travel to fulfill the organization’s mission of funding the highest-quality research on gambling disorders and increasing public education opportunities. This post is from Nathan Smith, the NCRG’s Program Officer, about his travels on behalf of the NCRG to the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) conference in Atlanta, Ga., and the American Psychological Association conference in Orlando, Fla.

Last April, I had the opportunity to attend theAmerican Society of Addiction Medicine(ASAM) conference in Atlanta. I was particularly excited for the trip because it represented a series of firsts: the first time the NCRG connected with ASAM, my first time exhibiting at a conference for the NCRG, my first chance to personally give our new screening magnets to addiction doctors, and the first time an airline lost my suitcase (though, I could have lived without this last bit of excitement).

Even though I had never worked at a conference exhibit before, I was delighted to find that the ASAM members were very interested in gambling disorders. People who stopped to chat with me were keenly interested in all of our free educational resources, especiallyour free online webinarsandmonograph serieson recent peer-reviewed research. I was also able to talk to a lot of folks about our new magnets printed with a brief gambling screen. The magnets were designed to go on a desk or file cabinet in a doctor’s office, and the brief screen used is theBrief Biosocial Gambling Screen(BBGS) from the Division on Addictions (at Cambridge Health Alliance, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School).

I also had the opportunity to attend some of the conference sessions. The first plenary session stood out in particular because the speaker,Dr. Richard Saitzof Boston University Medical Center, promised a critique of the literature on Screening and Brief Interventions (SBI). This is a subject we, at the NCRG, areveryinterested in because we have funded three grants on SBIs in the past two years, with total cost of just over $500,000! So suffice it to say I was nervous to attend a session that could call into question our investment. However, what Dr. Saitz presented was a well reasoned plea for more deliberate study of SBIs. Most of his talk came from a recent paper he published aboutalcohol related SBIs, but the lessons are a good reminder for everyone working with health related research: don’t overstep the published research, rely on randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and do (or in our case, fund) more research. By the end of the talk I felt confident about our NCRG projects, all of which are RCTs done by researchers with good track records.

The ASAM meeting also gave me a chance to connect with people interested in our field – which is sometimes rare in larger psychological meetings. It was nice to meet new people interested in our work, but I also got to see some familiar faces. In particular, I saw Dr. Scott Teitelbaum from the University of Florida College of Medicine. You may recall that Dr. Teitelbaum spoke at the NCRG Conference on Gambling and Addiction in 2011, and Iinterviewed himfor the blog during the conference. Dr. Teitelbaum is a member of the ASAM board of directors, and it was good to see him continuing his work on treating people with addiction.

After the ASAM meeting (and tracking down my suitcase), I was off again to theAmerican Psychological Association’s(APA) annual meeting in Orlando, Fla. APA is a huge conference where researchers and clinicians from all over the world get together to learn and share ideas. APA attendees can go to sessions from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. for four days straight!

There were many sessions worth highlighting from APA, but one that stood out was a session dedicated to remembering the pioneering work ofG. Alan Marlatt. Dr. Marlatt was an addictions researcher at the University of Washington whose work on harm-reduction, brief interventions and college drinking pushed the field of addictions research into a new era and paved the way for many addiction researchers. Among the presenters was NCRG grantee Dr. Mary Larimar, who worked with Dr. Marlatt for almost 30 years and is currently applying some of Dr. Marlatt’s concepts on brief interventions for alcohol use disorders to gambling disorders.

Overall, both trips allowed me to connect with clinicians and researchers in direct and personal ways and I hope that many of the investigators I spoke with will apply for NCRG funding in the future. You never know if the poster presenter or graduate student you are speaking with will be the next Scott Teitelbaum, Mary Larimar or even the next G. Alan Marlatt. Here’s hoping for continued success for all the attendees of this year’s ASAM and APA conferences.

Did you attend any conferences this year? Which conferences should the NCRG visit next year?

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For college students, fall can be a time where they place bets on college football games and arrange their lineup in their fantasy football leagues. Researchers have found that about 75 percent of college students have gambled in the past year and about 6 percent have experienced problems with their gambling (Barnes, Welte, Hoffman, & Tidwell, 2010). One recent study has started to address this issue by putting to the test two promising treatment methods for college students experiencing gambling problems in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) (Larimer et al., 2011).

This study is of special interest to us at the NCRG because werecently fundedone of the researchers to develop an online version of a personalized feedback intervention, one of the treatments tested in this article, for our web-based resource about gambling on college campuses:www.CollegeGambling.org.

The study, published recently in the journalAddiction, randomly assigned 147 students who reported having at least three symptoms of gambling disorders to one of three groups. Two of the groups received treatment, with the first group attending a 60 to 90 minute in-person personalized feedback intervention (PFI). PFIs are based on the theory that most people with gambling problems think that the general public gambles as much as they do (this belief is called “perception of gambling frequency”) and when they find out that they gamble much more than most they will curb their behavior to be more in line with the average.

The second treatment group attended four to six one-hour group sessions of a cognitive behavioral intervention (CBI). The CBI gave information about topics such as relapse prevention and illusions of control (a commonly held overconfidence in one’s ability to control event outcomes), while also teaching skills like coping with triggers and assertiveness. The third group was an assessment-only control (AOC), meaning that they received no treatment but were assessed at the same times and in the same ways as the treatment groups.

The researchers found that at the six-month follow-up, subjects in both treatment groups reported significantly reducing their gambling, having fewer gambling related symptoms, and experiencing fewer gambling related negative consequences. Additionally, the PFI group experienced reduced perceptions of gambling frequency norms and the CBI group experienced reduced illusions of control. The researchers concluded that both interventions might be helpful in reducing disordered gambling among college students.

To find out more about this study, visit thejournal’s website. For more information about college gambling, visit CollegeGambling.org. Also remember to share any thoughts or questions in the Comments section below.

References

Barnes, G. M., Welte, J. W., Hoffman, J. H., & Tidwell, M.-C. O. (2010). Comparisons of gambling and alcohol use among college students and noncollege young people in the United States.Journal of American College Health: J of ACH,58(5), 443–452. doi:10.1080/07448480903540499

Larimer, M. E., Neighbors, C., Lostutter, T. W., Whiteside, U., Cronce, J. M., Kaysen, D., & Walker, D. D. (2011). Brief Motivational Feedback and Cognitive Behavioral Interventions for Prevention of Disordered Gambling: A Randomized Clinical Trial.Addiction (Abingdon, England). doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03776.x

NCRG staffResearch Updatecollege studentscollegegambling.orggambling disordersresearchresponsible gaming

The NCRG blog team recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Clayton Neighbors, director of theSocial Influences and Health Behaviors Labat the University of Houston. Last year, Dr. Neighbors wasawarded an NCRG grantto develop and test an online screening and brief intervention (SBI) aimed at reducing gambling-related problems among college students. The SBI will be included on the NCRG’s website,CollegeGambling.org, which was developed as a free resource to help colleges and universities address gambling disorders and responsible gaming on campus.

During the interview, Dr. Neighbors discussed some of the theoretical underpinnings of the study, titled ‘A Randomized Controlled Trial of Personalized Normative Feedback for Problem Gambling College Students.’ He also discussed how his previous work on an online SBI for alcohol abuse among college students will affect the development of the current project, as well as the role that gender may play in the research.

Click below for the NCRG blog team interview with Dr. Neighbors.To learn more about all of his research, please visit his website at theUniversity of Houston. For more information about the NCRG and the research that we fund, please visit theResearch Centerpage on our website.

Do you have thoughts or questions about college gambling? Please leave them in the comments section below.

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The NCRG is excited to welcome three new members to its board of directors and two new members to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

The NCRG board of directors elected Jonathan S. Halkyard, executive vice president and chief financial officer of NV Energy; Kathleen M. Scanlan, senior advisor of special projects for the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling; and Andrew S. Zarnett, managing director for Deutsche Bank, to join as members.

The 11-member NCRG board of directors includes representatives from the gaming industry and the public health and regulatory communities. As the practical, hands-on management group of the organization, the board focuses on education and outreach program creation and implementation.

The SAB also added two new members, Tammy Chung, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh; and Miriam Jorgensen, Ph.D., M.P.P., research director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy at the University of Arizona and research director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, to round out their membership of eight leading independent scientists with expertise in addiction and related topics.

The SAB plays a vital role by ensuring the NCRG follows rigorous standards in awarding grants for only the highest-quality research proposals. The board’s main responsibilities are to monitor the progress of the NCRG Centers of Excellence in Gambling Research and to evaluate the conduct of the project grants program, including the peer review process. Members also advise on the development of funding initiatives and educational activities.

The NCRG team looks forward to working with these new members, and we know they will help to further fulfill our mission of addressing gambling disorders and responsible gaming from all perspectives.Click hereto read the press release, and leave any questions or comments about this announcement in the section below.

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