News by Subject Social & Behavior

The US government's attempt to crack down on Internet gambling is widely seen as a convoluted mess. Yet, more controlled and defined regulation would likely benefit the $41 billion industry and protect consumers alike, finds a new study by Michigan State University business scholars.

If a young man is a chronic gambler, the chances are extremely high that he also suffers from depression. This is one of the findings from a study led by Frédéric Dussault of the University of Quebec at Montreal in Canada. Published in Springer's Journal of Gambling Studies, it is the first to investigate the extent to which gambling and depression develop hand-in-hand from the teenage years to early adulthood.

A new Tel Aviv University study indicates that high-schoolers involved in competitive sports are at an elevated risk of addictive gambling. According to the research, the participation of male high-school students in competitive sports is associated with problem gambling and gambling frequency, and female students who participate in competitive sports are at a higher risk of gambling frequency.

The world's first comprehensive report on global addictions has revealed Australians smoke less tobacco and drink less alcohol than the British, but Aussies take more illicit drugs.

Pathological gamblers 'see' patterns in things that are actually quite random and not really there, to such a degree that they are quite willing to impulsively bet good money on such illusory nonrandomness. This is confirmed by Wolfgang Gaissmaier of the University of Konstanz in Germany and Andreas Wilke of Clarkson University in the USA, leaders of a study in Springer's Journal of Gambling Studies.

More than 1.6 million college-aged adults meet the criteria for problem gambling. This can lead to difficulties at work, school or home, and with relationships, personal finances, and mental and physical health. Counseling for problem gamblers can be expensive and time consuming; a new study from the University of Missouri has found that college-aged adults who were diagnosed as problem gamblers significantly changed their behaviors after receiving personalized feedback from computers.

It's called the gambler's fallacy: After a long streak of losses, you feel you are going to win. But in reality, your odds of winning are no different than they were before. For years, the gambler's fallacy has been thought to be a prime example of human irrationality, but a new study published by researchers from the Texas A&M Health Science Center suggests that our brains naturally soak up the strange statistics of random sequences.

People are more likely to gamble after having their memories primed, an international team of researchers has found. When reminded, or primed, of past winning outcomes as part of a controlled test, people were over 15 percent more likely to gamble and select the risky option. Surprisingly, being reminded of past losing outcomes did not change their gambling behavior.

For human beings, implementing and having others implement social equity is important, so much so that we are prepared to forego a sure advantage if this derives from an unfair distribution of resources, regardless of whether we ourselves or others are the target of the unfairness. However a study just published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and carried out with the collaboration of SISSA in Trieste, shows that the brain circuits at work in the two cases differ.