Gambling, motor cautiousness, and choice impulsivity: an experimental study

Harris, A. ORCID: 0000-0001-9627-4900, Kuss, D. ORCID: 0000-0001-8917-782X and Griffiths, M.D. ORCID: 0000-0001-8880-6524, 2018. Gambling, motor cautiousness, and choice impulsivity: an experimental study. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 7 (4), pp. 1030-1043. ISSN 2062-5871

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Abstract

Background: Impulsivity is currently more commonly regarded as multifaceted, comprising both motor and cognitive subdomains. However, it is less clear how distinct these subdomains are, and the extent to which they interact and draw upon the same psychological resources.

Methods: The present experiment comprised 70 regular (non-problem) gamblers, and investigated the potential to induce impulsivity transfer effects within an electronic gambling context. Original and existing harm-minimization approaches were tested for their efficacy in inducing motor cautiousness during an electronic slot machine simulation. Participants were exposed to a forced discriminatory motor choice procedure, or pop-up responsible gambling messages that either contained emotive or non-emotive responsible gambling content. The subsequent impact these interventions had on delay discounting and reflection impulsivity was also measured using the 27-item Monetary Choice Questionnaire and Information Sampling Task, respectively.

Results: Findings demonstrated that only original harm-minimization approaches, which force the gambler to engage in discriminatory motor choice procedures during gambling, were successful in inducing motor cautiousness. However, both the discriminatory choice procedure and emotive message harm-minimization approaches were successful in facilitating cognitive choice, even though the emotive message intervention was unsuccessful in facilitating motor response inhibition, suggesting both an indirect motor cautiousness route, and a more direct route to improved cognitive choice during gambling.

Conclusion: This study demonstrated that decision-making during gambling can be improved by making simple structural changes to slot machine platforms, by encouraging active engagement in motor processes, which result in a transfer of cautiousness to wider cognitive domains.

Item Type: Journal article
Publication Title: Journal of Behavioral Addictions
Creators: Harris, A., Kuss, D. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher: Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt.
Date: 14 November 2018
Volume: 7
Number: 4
ISSN: 2062-5871
Identifiers:
NumberType
10.1556/2006.7.2018.108DOI
Rights: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the CC License is provided, and changes – if any – are indicated.
Divisions: Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by: Jill Tomkinson
Date Added: 26 Nov 2018 15:50
Last Modified: 11 Jul 2019 16:00
URI: https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/35131

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