Funded Research

Seed Grant: “ The Role of Recovery Capital and Gender Differences in Recovery from Gambling Disorder – A Mixed Methods Design”

Principal Investigator: Belle Gavriel-Fried, PhD, Tel Aviv University

Awarded $34,500 in 2017

Aims: (1) Examine the applicability of the concept of Recovery Capital to recovery from gambling addiction; and (2) probe gender differences in relation to their recovery and recovery capital. One-hundred and forty individuals who terminated treatment of gambling disorders in the previous 1-5 years will be asked to complete questionnaires including the gambling follow-up scale, the DSM-5 GD, the Assessment of Recovery Capital, and 3 open-ended questions.

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Seed Grant: “At‐risk Gambling in Credit Counseling: Prevalence and Feasibility of Brief Intervention”

Principal Investigator: Paul Sacco, PhD, University of Maryland, Baltimore

Awarded $34,500 in 2017

Aims:  (1) To pilot screening for problem gambling in a sample of adults who seek services from a national consumer credit counseling organization; (2) To compare prevalence of at-risk gambling in consumer credit counseling users to national estimates; and (3) To evaluate the perceived acceptability and feasibility of gambling screening from the perspective of credit counselors.

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Travel Grant: “Altered Reward Processing as a Vulnerability for Gambling Disorder: a functional MRI study in Unaffected Siblings”

Principal Investigator: Eve Limbrick-Oldfield, PhD, University of British Columbia

Awarded $1,500 in 2017

Dr. Limbrick-Oldfield will present a poster and an oral presentation at the 2017 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry.

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Responsible Gaming Association of New Mexico Grant: “Problem Gambling in New Mexico: A Study of at risk Youth and Adults”

Principal Investigator: Martha W. Waller, PhD, Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation

Awarded $291,868 in 2017

Aim: Examine gambling behavior among adolescents and adults across New Mexico with specific focus on subpopulations of race/ethnicity, military involvement, parents of minors, sexual minorities, housing unstable, and college students.  Building on existing long-term relationships with prevention communities across the state, the investigators will use a culturally competent, mixed-methods data collection approach to gather data from youth and adults across all regions of the state including rural, frontier, tribal, and urban locations to estimate problem gambling prevalence and statistically model the association with co-occurring risk and protective factors.

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Seed Grant: “Increased Gambling-like Behavior after Experimental Traumatic Brain Injury: A Dopamine Reduction Hypothesis”

Principal Investigator:  Cole Vonder Haar, PhD, West Virginia University

Awarded $34,413 in 2017

Aim: Understand the factors that lead to the development of Gambling Disorder after brain injury through a study of the decision-making abilities of brain-injured rats.

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University of Missouri, Columbia

Principal Investigator: Wendy S. Slutske, PhD

Award: $396,559 in 2017

Only about 10% of individuals with disordered gambling (DG) seek treatment and there is evidence that studies based on this treatment-seeking minority may not generalize to the larger population of those with DG in the community. A challenge to conducting community-based studies of DG is the fact that it is relatively rare. In this proposed Center of Excellence we have taken on this challenge by assembling a unique suite of six community-based studies of DG along with a team of investigators who have the requisite expertise to interrogate these data. Together, these projects will move us forward in answering the following pressing questions about the etiology and epidemiology of DG: (1) is living in a disadvantaged neighborhood a (potentially malleable) environmental cause of DG?, (2) where among the ~20,000 genes in the human genome are the variants associated with the risk for DG? (3) do the genetic variants associated with DG overlap with the genetic variants associated with the risk for alcohol, nicotine, and cannabis use disorders and individual differences in personality traits?, (4) what is the long-term stability of DG, and (5) are the correlates of DG similar across the lifespan (i.e. in the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s)? The projects include secondary analyses of data from (a) two Australian twin cohorts (with a high prevalence of DG), (b) a large longitudinal study conducted in the UK, (c) a large longitudinal study conducted in the US (d) a large Swedish epidemiologic study (the largest community-based study of DG yet conducted), and (e) a large longitudinal study of a complete New Zealand birth cohort (the longest longitudinal follow-up of DG yet conducted). The availability of these valuable and unique datasets will allow us to conduct impactful research at very low cost.

The Center of Excellence will be based in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, which has more tenured faculty members with a focus on addictions research than any other psychology department in the world. The addictions faculty have already established a successful program for training the next generation of addictions scholars, primarily focused on alcohol. We will expand the scope of this training program to also provide training in research on DG. Historically, gambling research at the University of Missouri has been widely cited by the scientific community (over 2,000 citations in 2000-2016) as well as by the mass media (e.g., stories in Time, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal). We will maintain this tradition and seek out improved methods of disseminating our research findings through the involvement of our home department and the University of Missouri News Bureau.

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