Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 67, Issue 8, 15 April 2010, Pages 781-783
Biological Psychiatry

Brief Report
Hypersensitivity to Reward in Problem Gamblers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.11.009Get rights and content

Background

Recent research has begun to examine the neurophysiologic basis of pathological gambling. However, direct evidence of a behavioral deficit and an accompanying neurofunctional deviation in a realistic gambling context such as Black Jack has not yet been reported.

Methods

Electroencephalogram was recorded while 20 problem gamblers and 21 control participants played a computerized version of Black Jack. Participants were asked to decide at point scores between 11 and 21 whether they wanted to take another card (“hit”) to arrive closer to 21 than the opponent (simulated by computer) or not to take another card (“sit”) to avoid going over 21 (“bust”).

Results

At a critical point score of 16, problem gamblers decided more often to hit despite losses due to a bust on the preceding trial, whereas control participants decided more often to sit under these conditions. Furthermore, problem gamblers showed more reward-related positive amplitudes in the event-related brain potential than control participants after successful hit decisions at 16.

Conclusions

Here we provide experimental evidence for high-risk taking behavior in gamblers and its correlate in event-related brain potentials. Our results suggest that high-risk-taking behavior in problem gamblers is associated with an increased reward-related neural response to infrequent successes of this behavior.

Section snippets

Participants

Forty-three male participants were recruited from the student population of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität and the University of Applied Sciences at Jena (21 problem gamblers; mean age: 23.00 years, SD ± 3.2 years; 22 control participants; mean age: 23.54 years, SD ± 4.5 years). Participants were initially selected from a group of 529 respondents on the basis of responses to the Short Questionnaire for Gambling (Kurzfragebogen zur Glücksspielsucht, 14). The 30 highest scorers were assigned

Results

We first analyzed decision-making behavior at a point score of 16. After a previous no-bust trial, both problem gamblers and control participants hit at 16 with a probability of approximately .5 (Figure 1A). However, following a bust on the previous trial, the probability of hitting decreased for control participants (.45) but increased for gamblers (.57). The interaction of group by previous outcome was significant: F(1,39) = 6.54, p = .015. Thus, the gamblers made more risky decisions after a

Discussion

These data suggest that problem gamblers take risky decisions in the face of prior losses, a form of deviant behavior that resembles that exhibited by problem gamblers in real life. This deviant behavior is associated with a hypersensitive response to rewards (no-busts) rather than to an insensitivity to negative events (busts).

The hypersensitive neural response to unexpected rewards (not busting after “hitting” at a score of 16) is manifested in a positive ERP component with a latency of 300

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