GAMBLING AND COGNITIVE THERAPY

Gambling and Cognitive Therapy

Gambling and Cognitive Therapy

Introduction

Gambling has become a major recreational activity in the United States. In the past, legalized gambling was confined to a few states, such as Nevada and New Jersey, but in the past two decades gambling opportunities have expanded. Some form of legalized gambling exists now in all but two states; 37 have lotteries, and 27 have casino gambling (Argo & Black, 2004). A 1999 survey showed that nearly 90% of the adult population participates in some form of legalized gambling, especially instant lottery games, slot machines, office pools, and card games. In the 23 years from 1974 to 1997, gambling expenditures more than doubled as a percentage of personal income. This paper discusses gambling and cognitive therapy in a concise and comprehensive way.

Gambling and Cognitive Therapy: A Discussion

Argo & Black (2004) mention in the past several years, cognitive therapy has emerged as an effective treatment approach for a wide variety of clinical disorders, in particular, anxiety disorders and non-psychotic mood disorders. It may be uniquely suitable for people affected by problem gambling, given their highly dysfunctional cognitive processes, though its efficacy has not yet been demonstrated. This section outlines a cognitive approach to treating problem gambling.

Some have suggested that problem gambling may be better understood as a disorder of thinking since people affected by problem gambling appear to have unique and some would say quite unusual beliefs and attitudes about control, luck, prediction and chance (Argo & Black, 2004). In other words, when the gambler is in “action” (e.g., placing a wager, depositing money in a slot machine) he or she is faced with a series of decisions that can be powerfully affected by thinking (“cognitive”) biases, distorted reasoning, and errors in judgment. Since cognitive approaches to treatment have been successfully applied to many other clinical problems in which cognitive distortions play an important role (e.g., anxiety, depression, substance abuse), there is good reason to expect that a cognitive approach would be effective for a problem gambler.

From what we know about the cognitive traits of people affected by problem gambling (briefly summarized below), such knowledge may be important in developing effective treatments for problem gambling.

Over the past few years we have learned how easy it is for non-gamblers and non-problem gamblers to quickly develop incorrect assumptions about how much control they have over outcomes that are largely determined by chance. Experts suggested that serious gamblers eventually develop an “illusion of control”; they tend to believe that there is a greater probability of obtaining an outcome determined by chance than is actually the case (Pallanti, et al, 2006). In Langer's research, subjects quickly began to believe that they were able to influence chance-determined outcomes, even when the experiment had been so arranged that they had no control at all. Two examples — subjects placing a higher monetary value on lottery tickets they chose than on tickets randomly assigned, or believing that they had a special skill when they were successful in predicting coin-tossed ...