EPA-1134 – Evaluation of a gambling-related wordlist by a population of casino gamblers and a non-gambler control group to create a standardized corpus

Abstract

Pathological gambling is defined as a behavioural addiction, characterized by loss of control and by the fact that the person may continue to gamble in spite of social, economic, interpersonal, or legal problems as a result of the gambling. Some studies have pointed out that automatic cognitive biases may drive psychological mechanisms leading to loss of control during gambling. These automatic processes can be studied in cognitive psychology by using lexical decision task, which requires gambling's related words corpus. However, such a corpus is absent from scientific publications. the principal aim of our study was to establish a standardized list of gambling-related words with a population of casino gamblers and a non-gambler control group. The second aim of our study was to compare the respective evaluation of the two populations. 247 casino gamblers, recruited at the casino, and 127 control subjects, matched for age, sex and educational level, scored 118 gambling-related words based on 3 criteria: gambling association's level, emotional valence and familiarity. Gambling behaviour was assessed by the South Oaks Gambling Screen. We identified a subset of 45 words that were the most associated with gambling and analysed scores for the 3 criteria. Concerning emotional valence, gamblers assessed more positively gambling-related words than the control group. Scores between pathological and social gamblers were similar for the 3 criteria. this gambling related wordlist will allow to design experimental material with defined parameters to study automatic and controlled process that mediate pathological gambling.