Alcohol Effects on Gambling Behavior

Recently, a primary focus of my lab-based research has been the study of alcohol effects on gambling behavior. The dissertation project of one of my graduate students, Jessica Cronce, comprised the first study in my lab on this topic. This study examined the effects of alcohol, on a simulated slot machine task. Currently we are working on a follow-up for this study on a larger scale using a simulated poker task and more sophisticated methods. We recently received funding (R21) for this study from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).  The proposed work has potentially important implications for gambling prevention and intervention, as both persistence within a single gambling session and initiation of future gambling sessions can contribute to mounting financial losses.

In addition to studying alcohol effects on real-world risk taking including gambling behavior, my lab based studies are designed to examine alcohol effects on basic cognitive processes that may represent mechanisms through which alcohol affects risk taking. Examples include behavioral control, attention, and one’s ability to learn and adapt to new situations. The results have important implications for prevention efforts targeting intoxicated individuals. For example, increasing the likelihood that an individual will be cited for driving under the influence (DUI) may have greater impact that increasing the severity of punishment.  In my current lab study, I have been fortunate to collaborate with faculty in our department (Dr. Teresa Treat and Dr. Brian Scholl) who have expertise in the use of cognitive science paradigms that are particularly well suited to assessing alcohol effects on decision making and risk taking. We have been collecting data on an attentional blink task (Raymond et al., 1992) and the Bechara gambling task (Bechara et al., 1994) and thus far the results look promising. Dr. Treat and I are currently developing a stimulus set of alcohol related words that vary along both valence and arousal dimensions to extend this work to an examination of how alcohol influences the temporal allocation of attention to motivationally relevant stimuli. We hope the results will help clarify the specific aspects of decision making that are impacted by an intoxicating dose of alcohol.