Gambling, risk-taking and alcohol with Tori Horn

In this episode, Tori Horn from the University of Memphis talks about her recent systematic review of risk-taking and gambling whilst drinking.

Tori talks about the moderators between alcohol and risk-taking and how her and her colleagues screened 30,000 papers to examine the influence of blood alcohol concentration, gender, the type of gambling and other factors as potential moderators of this relationship.

“We thought perhaps that, what’s influencing this is the expectancies, and the vast majority of studies included used the placebo design […] which led us to conclude that maybe people are expecting, once they’re told they’re consuming alcohol, that their behaviour’s going to be different.”

Tori talks about the different ways that risk-taking is measured in studies, including inflating balloons until they burst for a cash pay-out. She also explores the problems with lab designs and the challenge of translating research into naturalistic settings.

Original research article: Does acute alcohol consumption increase risk-taking while gambling? A systematic review and meta-analysis. By Tori Horn and colleagues. Published in Addiction (2022).

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