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Social sciences
- Psychopathology
- Cognitive processes
- Motivation and emotion
- Motor processes and action
Gambling-related harms are a major public health issue worldwide, including in Belgium. Many gambling-related harms stem from gamblers' tendency to continue betting after losing or winning money, which are called loss-chasing and win-chasing, respectively. Both types of chasing behaviors lead to excessive betting and facilitate the transition from recreational to problematic gambling, yet their underlying psychological mechanisms remain unclear. To fill this important gap, in the current project I will (1) develop a novel 'chasing' task that captures both loss-chasing and win-chasing, (2) build an integrative computational model to account for the chasing decisions in the 'chasing' task, and (3) leverage this task and computational model to examine how the psychological processes underlying chasing vary across individuals (i.e., person), and are influenced by certain structural features of gambling products (i.e., product). Together, this project bridges separate research fields and integrates currently disparate theoretical perspectives on chasing behavior and risky decision making. The novel computational person-product framework will provide a process-level understanding of how chasing decisions in gambling are made and can be influenced, which will be essential in designing effective regulations and interventions to prevent and reduce gambling-related harms.