Spilleavhengighet og atferdsanalyse

Abstract

Excessive gambling is a growing problem in the world, and the prevalence is approximately 1-2 % Petry (2005) . Hence the need for effective treatment is increasing. Article 1 consists of five different disciplines view regarding severe gambling problematic. The behavior analytic theory will be discussed particularly. The themes that will be discussed are mainly varies sides of reinforcement, delay of discount, verbal behavior and response cost. The study in article 2 was a replication and extension of Hoon, Dymond, Jackson and Dixon (2008), investigating the effect of manipulating two contextual factors in participants responding to two concurrently available simulated slot machines. The contextual stimuli were the background colors (yellow and blue) of the slot machines. The background colors were established as a contextual cue, respectively ”greater than" and ”less than" through a conditional discrimination training procedure. The study consisted of three experiments. In Experiment 1, 20 participants were during the pre-test exposed to two competing slot machines in which the only difference was the color, followed by the conditional discrimination procedure. This was followed by a post-test similar to the pretest. The findings did not replicate Hoon et al. (2008). Experiment 2 and 3, consisted of 18 and 6 participants respectively. The participants were exposed to a withdrawal design including two sessions of discrimination training and two post- tests. The slot machines were programmed on a Random Ratio schedule of reinforcement in which the probability of reinforcement was 80 % chance of winning for the “greater than” color, and a 20 % chance of winning for the” less than” color. After completing the post-test 2, the findings showed that several of the participants allocated the majority of their responses to the slot machine that indicated “more than”. In Experiment 3 the participants were also exposed to post -experimental questions. The result showed a correlation between the data from slot-machines and the verbal reports