Gambling Disorders and Decision Making
The decisions of people who are addicted to or impaired by gambling are markedly inflexible. However, whether abnormalities in learning from feedback are specific to gambling or extend beyond the gambling context is an open question.
It has been proposed that addictive disorders, including gambling addiction in general, are facilitated by individual differences in the flexibility of feedback-driven decision making, and have been studied in the lab using a probabilistic reversal learning task (PRLT).
In the study.
25 treatment-seeking patients who had been diagnosed with an addictive disorder and reported a gambling problem, and 25 controls, divided into groups. In addition to testing for differences in the shape of the PRLT learning curve between the groups, the impact of identifying the severity of problem gambling symptoms was also assessed independently of group assignment.
To overcome previous methodological problems, a generalized mixed-effects model was used to fit the full acquisition and reacquisition curves.
As a result.
(1) Controls did not differ significantly from patients in global PRLT performance and did not show any specific signs of inflexibility in decision making.
(2) Regardless of whether group affiliation was controlled or not, gambling severity was specifically associated with more inefficient learning in the contingency reversal phase.
In conclusion, gambling addiction and weak decision-making were related in some respects, but being in an environment that leads to addiction was also seen as more problematic. The relationship to substance abuse was unclear.
Jara-Rizzo, M.F., Navas, J.F., Rodas, J.A. et al. Decision-making inflexibility in a reversal learning task is associated with severity of problem Decision-making inflexibility in a reversal learning task is associated with severity of problem gambling symptoms but not with a diagnosis of substance use disorder. BMC Psychol 8, 120 (2020). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00482-6
Summary
This study showed that inflexible thinking is partially related to gambling addiction. It was not that gambling addiction = inflexible thinking, but rather that the environment in which one gambles is problematic because inflexible thinking has little to do with whether or not one is addicted to gambling.
In the study, only severe addicts were shown to be associated with inflexible thinking, so it is important not to associate becoming an addict with inflexible thinking per se.
