Attentional disengagement, craving, and mentalizing: a preliminary experimental study among older-aged male gamblers

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Ciccarelli, M, Pizzini, B, Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, Cosenza, M, Nigro, G and D’Olimpio, F, 2024. Attentional disengagement, craving, and mentalizing: a preliminary experimental study among older-aged male gamblers. BMC Psychology, 12: 164. ISSN 2050-7283

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01651-7

Abstract

Introduction: Empirical studies have demonstrated the role that attentional bias, the mutual excitatory relationship between attentional bias and craving, and mentalizing play in problem gambling. Although problem gambling rates among older-aged adults have steadily increased in recent years, research studies among this cohort are scarce. The present study is the first to empirically investigate attentional bias, as well as the joint role of attentional bias, craving, and mentalizing among older-aged gamblers.

Method: Thirty-six male older-aged gamblers were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), the Gambling Craving Scale (GACS), and the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (RFQ-8) to assess gambling severity, craving levels, and mentalizing, respectively. Participants also performed a modified Posner Task to investigate attentional biases.

Results: Hierarchical linear regression analysis showed that among older-aged male gamblers, GACS Anticipation and RFQ-8 Uncertainty about mental states, as well as disengagement bias at 100 ms, significantly predicted gambling severity.

Conclusion: The present study provides the first empirical support for the role of attentional bias, craving, and mentalizing among older-aged gambling. More specifically, a difficult in disengaging attention away from gambling, the anticipation of pleasure deriving from gambling, and hypomentalizing predicted gambling severity among older-aged gamblers. The findings make an important contribution, by identifying the factors responsible for problem gambling among this specific age cohort and suggesting that timely interventions for mentalizing and attentional bias may be necessary to prevent problem gambling in old age.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	BMC Psychology
Creators:	Ciccarelli, M., Pizzini, B., Griffiths, M.D., Cosenza, M., Nigro, G. and D’Olimpio, F.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	2024
Volume:	12
ISSN:	2050-7283
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1186/s40359-024-01651-7 DOI 1878863 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	25 Mar 2024 11:00
Last Modified:	25 Mar 2024 11:00
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/51149