Video lottery: winning expectancies and arousal

Robert Ladouceur · Serge Sévigny · Alex P. Blaszczynski · Kieron Philip O’Connor · Marc E. Lavoie

107 citations0/0 files storedAddiction

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gambling Behavior and Treatments Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

Abstract

AIMS: This study investigates the effects of video lottery players' expectancies of winning on physiological and subjective arousal. DESIGN: Participants were assigned randomly to one of two experimental conditions: high and low winning expectancies. SETTING: Participants played 100 video lottery games in a laboratory setting while physiological measures were recorded. Level of risk-taking was controlled. PARTICIPANTS: Participants were 34 occasional or regular video lottery players. They were assigned randomly into two groups of 17, with nine men and eight women in each group. INTERVENTION: The low-expectancy group played for fun, therefore expecting to win worthless credits, while the high-expectancy group played for real money. MEASUREMENTS: Players' experience, demographic variables and subjective arousal were assessed. Severity of problem gambling was measured with the South Oaks Gambling Screen. In order to measure arousal, the average heart rate was recorded across eight periods. FINDINGS: Participants exposed to high as compared to low expectations experienced faster heart rate prior to and during the gambling session. According to self-reports, it is the expectancy of winning money that is exciting, not playing the game. CONCLUSIONS: Regardless of the level of risk-taking, expectancy of winning is a cognitive factor influencing levels of arousal. When playing for fun, gambling becomes significantly less stimulating than when playing for money.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 107 citations exist upstream.

References

1987The South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS): a new instrument for the identification of pathological gamblers 1980The Three Arousal Model: Implications of Gray's Two‐Factor Learning Theory for Heart Rate, Electrodermal Activity, and Psychopathy 1980Techniques in psychophysiology 1984Real and laboratory gambling, sensation‐seeking and arousal 1988Refining prevalence estimates of pathological gambling 2000Casino gambling increases heart rate and salivary cortisol in regular gamblers 1985Levels of arousal in high- and low-frequency gamblers 1993Tolerance in gambling: An objective measure using the psychophysiological analysis of male fruit machine gamblers

Cited by

2010Neurobiological correlates of problem gambling in a quasi-realistic blackjack scenario as revealed by fMRI 2011Trait gambling cognitions predict near‐miss experiences and persistence in laboratory slot machine gambling 2008The Relevance and Role of Gaming Machine Games and Game Features on the Play of Problem Gamblers

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.