Research on Gambling in Young People: A Co-Occurrence Analysis

Relieving the Gambling Itch Through Alcohol Consumption: The Impact of COVID-19 Restrictions on Australian Casino Patrons

This paper extends our understanding of how casino patrons are affected by COVID-19 restrictions and how they cope by substituting gambling with alcohol consumption. We conducted two studies using a nationwide survey sample collected in Australia during the pandemic lockdown. Study 1 compares the casino patrons with two reference groups (other gambling patrons and non-gambling individuals) and investigates the lockdown restrictions on respondents' relational strength, and their potential impact on mental health and future prospects. Study 2 applies the stress-response dampening model (SRD) and tests how respondents used alcohol consumption to cope with the lack of access to casinos during the lockdown. The results from Study 1 suggest that lockdown restrictions on respondents' relational strength have significant negative impacts on anxiety, life satisfaction and post-pandemic outlook. Study 2 finds that casino patrons substituted gambling with alcohol consumption during the lockdown, with increased alcohol consumption negatively related to life satisfaction. Paradoxically, Australian gambling venue owners may not be adversely affected as many also run liquor retail operations.

Embedding-based terminology expansion via secondary use of large clinical real-world datasets

A log-likelihood based co-occurrence analysis of ∼1.9 million de-identified ICD-10 codes and related short textual problem list entries generated possible term candidates at a significance level of p<0.01. These top 10 term candidates, consisting of 1 to 5-grams, were used as seed terms for an embedding based nearest neighbor approach to fetch additional synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms in the respective n-gram embedding spaces by leveraging two different language models. This was done to analyze the lexicality of the resulting term candidates and to compare the term classifications of both models. We found no difference in system performance during the processing of lexical and non-lexical content, i.e. abbreviations, acronyms, etc. Additionally, an application-oriented analysis of the SapBERT (Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representations) language model indicates suitable performance for the extraction of all term classifications such as synonyms, hypernyms, and hyponyms.

Problematic Gambling Behavior in a Sample with Substance Use Disorder: The Role of Attachment Style and Alexithymia

Gambling disorder is a high comorbid disorder in substance abusers which conjunct appearance is related to worse symptomatology and evolution. Nevertheless, the research on the risk factors that may explain this comorbidity is scarce. We build of the self-regulation theory of attachment and addiction to examine if insecure attachment is related to gambling comorbidity in substance abuse disorder and the mediating role of alexithymia in this process. A cross-sectional study was carried out with 369 clinical patients with substance use disorder of which 69 presented comorbid gambling disorder diagnosed with the DSM-5 criteria. Results showed that insecure attachment was more prevalent in the group with comorbid gambling. In this group, the alexithymia levels were also higher and mediated the relationship in between attachment and gambling disorder comorbidity even controlling for several sociodemographic variables. This research indicates that insecure attachment enhances the risk of gambling comorbidity on substance abusers due to the detrimental effect on the self-regulation of emotion. Thus, interventions directed to increase the identification, expression and awareness of emotions might help to reduce comorbidity of gambling of substance use disorders.