GAMBLING DISORDERS 360°

Register today for one of the more popular training sessions that the NCRG has held for clinicians: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Problem Gambling. This one-hour free webinar, led by Lisa Najavits, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and NCRG Scientific Advisory Board member, will be held Friday, Feb. 8 from 2-3 p.m. EST and participants will receive 1 CEU for their attendance.

To coincide with its 10^th anniversary, the American Gaming Association (AGA) released an updated version of its Code of Conduct for Responsible Gaming, which reflects the various ways the gaming entertainment industry has evolved during the past decade.

One goal of the NCRG’s research program is to help investigators share their research findings with the larger addiction and mental health research communities. Because new research on gambling disorders is not usually represented at the premiere scientific meetings, the NCRG’s grants program established a Travel Grants category to support the participation of young gambling investigators in conferences such as the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Neuroscience and other meetings.

For 2013, the NCRG is excited to allocate $950,000 for funding new research for its competitive project grants program. This year, the research grants will be awarded in four previously-awarded categories.

Earlier this week, the NCRG announced it awarded more than $870,000 in 2012 to support 10 new research projects that will help to improve methods of diagnosis, intervention, treatment and prevention of gambling disorders.

In the spirit of end-of-the-year highlights lists, the NCRG staff perused the approximately 500 peer-reviewed publications released in 2012 to determine the most noteworthy studies in the field of gambling disorders and addiction.

Narrowing our list of 10 publications was a challenging task. Therefore, we decided to highlight articles that may predict future trends in research. We salute these authors and all of the investigators who are working to understand gambling disorders.

The NCRG staff, Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Board wishes you a belated Happy New Year! Last year was an exciting and productive time for the NCRG. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to post about the NCRG’s accomplishments and highlights from 2012.

The NCRG on the Road blog series includes posts from NCRG staff members as they travel to fulfill the organization’s mission of funding the highest-quality research on gambling disorders and increasing public education opportunities. This post is from Nathan Smith, the NCRG’s Program Officer, about his travels on behalf of the NCRG to the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) conference in Atlanta, Ga., and the American Psychological Association conference in Orlando, Fla.

Do people with gambling disorders think differently than those without? The answer is yes and no. One might assume that a person who is diagnosed with a gambling disorder must predictably and consistently make harmful choices. While this thought is true, research on decision making has shown that all humans make consistent and predictable cognitive errors (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Thus, finding and exploring the differences in cognitive errors made by people with and without a gambling disorder may offer valuable insights into understanding how gambling disorders impact the decision-making process. Correcting these cognitive distortions is also an important element in several common treatments for pathological gambling, and it has been theorized that merely teaching probability and reasoning skills may be able to prevent pathological gambling before it starts (though research has not yet supported this theory).

For college students, fall can be a time where they place bets on college football games and arrange their lineup in their fantasy football leagues. Researchers have found that about 75 percent of college students have gambled in the past year and about 6 percent have experienced problems with their gambling (Barnes, Welte, Hoffman, & Tidwell, 2010).  One recent study has started to address this issue by putting to the test two promising treatment methods for college students experiencing gambling problems in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) (Larimer et al., 2011).

This study is of special interest to us at the NCRG because we recently funded one of the researchers to develop an online version of a personalized feedback intervention, one of the treatments tested in this article, for our web-based resource about gambling on college campuses: www.CollegeGambling.org.