It’s all about gains: Risk preferences in problem gambling.

Abstract

Problem gambling is a serious socioeconomic problem involving high individual and social costs. In this article, we study risk preferences of problem gamblers including their risk attitudes in the gain and loss domains, their weighting of probabilities, and their degree of loss aversion. Our findings indicate that problem gamblers are systematically more risk taking and less sensitive toward changes in probabilities in the gain domain only. Neither their risk attitudes in the loss domain nor their degree of loss aversion are significantly different from the controls. Additional evidence for a similar degree of sensitivity toward negative outcomes is gained from skin conductance data-a psychophysiological marker for emotional arousal-in a threat-of-shock task. (PsycINFO Database Record

Gambling disorder is associated with reduced sensitivity to expected value during risky choice

“…The group differences in EV sensitivity were observed in both gain and loss-related choices. A group difference in GD on the loss version of the task is contrary to some other findings (Brevers et al, 2012;Ring et al, 2018;van Holst, Veltman, B€ uchel, Van Den Brink, & Goudriaan, 2012). Notably, in contrast to these previous experiments investigating loss-based decision making and aversive (threat of shock) processing (Brevers et al, 2012;Ring et al, 2018), the present study entailed more complex decisions between two risky lotteries, rather than choices between a certain outcome and a risky lottery.…”

“…We had no a priori prediction as to whether this would be due to altered processing of probability information, magnitude information, or preceding feedback. We predicted that group differences would be present in both gain and loss conditions, but we tested for any asymmetry (Brevers et al, 2012;Ring et al, 2018). Within the group with gambling disorder, we further expected that the sensitivity to EV information would be correlated with increasing problem gambling severity and increasing levels of gambling-related cognitive distortions.…”

“…The second approach has investigated decision-making under risk from the lens of behavioural economics, in an attempt to elucidate whether the suboptimal decision-making in gambling disorder is associated with changes in subjective weighting of probabilities (Ligneul, Sescousse, Barbalat, Domenech, & Dreher, 2012;Ring et al, 2018) or in the shape of the 'value function' that maps objective to subjective value. For example, loss aversion (the overweighting of losses compared to equivalent-size gains) was seen to be reduced in gambling disorder in some but not all studies (Gelskov, Madsen, Ramsøy, & Siebner, 2016;Genauck et al, 2017;Giorgetta et al, 2014;Takeuchi et al, 2015).…”

“…Aversive processing has received less attention, despite the recognition that altered processing of loss and negative consequences could contribute to gambling disorder (Brunborg et al, 2012). In a loss only version of the cups task, individuals with gambling disorder did not show suboptimal decision-making (Brevers et al, 2012) and a more recent loss task did not observe any differences in the use of probability information in gambling disorder (Ring et al, 2018).…”

Risk attitudes and digit ratio (2D:4D): Evidence from prospect theory

“…Vieider et al (2018) and Vieider et al (2019) used the same tasks and showed that they systematically correlated with demographic characteristics and economic behavior. Another study using the same method shows that gamblers' risk preferences were different than healthy subjects in the gain domain (Ring et al 2018).…”