Gambling - Contributing Factors

• Refers to a neural pathway in the brain that when stimulated, releases the neurotransmitter dopamine providing feelings of enjoyment and pleasure, which can reinforce and motivate a person to perform certain activities
• The unpredictability of gambling increases the release of dopamine

• Reward deficiency syndrome: An under active dopamine reward system. They do not experience pleasure and enjoyment from everyday activities. Seek out an extraordinary amount of excitement to feel the way others do normally. 
• Gambling provides this making them more likely to repeat it to receive the same feeling

Evidence of a hereditary link to problem gambling and addictive tendencies

• Gambling has a random variable ratio of reinforcement, which, coupled with gambling's mutually exclusive nature and an individual's ignorance thereof, promotes a steady response rate over a longer period of time and is very resistant to extinction
• Winning (reinforcement) is especially unpredictable

• Describes the way in which people acquire certain behaviours by observing and learning from and their role models through vicarious reinforcement
• If behaviour is reinforced an individual will imitate it

• Based on Freud's theories; gambling behaviour may be influenced by unconscious underlying reasons from the gambler's childhood/past
• Emotions connected to past events may contribute to gambling behaviours

Positive or accepting attitudes among community

Social permission of gambling opportunities (horse races)

Ease of access to gambling venues

Promotion of gambling

Boredom, unemployment, relationship issues