What Makes Gambling Addictive with Dr. Luke Clark

Yeah.

I think like, you know, a lot of undergrads that I teach at, at UBC, I got in the same way.

That I was interested in, you know, these themes in psychology that, that crop up a lot around risk-taking, around self-control, around, you know, emotional aspects of decision-making, and the fact that, you know, two people can be in a, in a similar sort of-- confront, uh, the same choice and yet make very different, um, decisions and, and what does that, what does that reflect? So I, I started off, I actually did my PhD studying, um, people with bipolar disorder, looking at mania, uh, where we see a lot of, um, risk-taking and sometimes financial risk-taking and, and, and, you know, impulse control difficulties.

Um, and then when I was a, a postdoc, I was working in quite, um, sort of mainstream cognitive neuroscience of, uh, impulse control and, and risk-taking.

So I, I learned, um, how to do some, some brain imaging with fMRI, and I was doing, uh, quite a lot of work with, um, neuropsychological cases, so people with, um, acquired, uh, brain injuries, uh, looking at, at their, um, risk-taking with some, you know, classic tasks.

There's a task called the Iowa gambling task, which has gambling in its name, which I think anyone who's done a psychology degree will have encountered that task.

It doesn't really capture gambling too much.

But, um, uh, so then I think the, the key, the key change was a, a sort of legal change.

Um, so I was-- this was all in the UK and in, um, the mid-2000s, the UK passed this huge review of its gambling laws, like the 2005 Gambling Act has had a, a lot, um, written about it.

And it was, um, you know, in the general direction of liberalization.

There was a lot more advertising following that act of, of gambling operators.

There was, uh, a lot of expansion of, of online gambling.

And, um, uh, in a way, those changes like foreshadow a lot of the things that have happened in, in Canada and across North America just in the last five to 10 years.

So this was happening in the UK kind of 20 years ago.

Um, and at the time, the kind of few experts who studied gambling in the UK did raise a lot of concerns that these things would lead to increased rates of, of gambling problems.

Um, and I think the, in a way, the kind of government's response to that was to channel some research funding into gambling research.

And so the first grant that I got as, um, as the sort of lead investigator was, um, looking at, at, at gambling near misses, uh, on a slot machine task using brain imaging.

And this really got me into the, you know, the very kind of specialist literature on, on gambling itself, sort of moving from sort of general risk-taking and impulse control to what is this actual, you know, literature on, um, gambling and gambling addiction.

Um, and I found it, it fascinating.

Um, and I, I, you know, effectively over the next 10 years, I sort of gradually specialized more and more where most of my research became around gambling.

Most of the grad students in my lab were, were studying that.

And then in, um, by 2014, I, I moved from the UK to, to UBC.

Um, and the, the position that came up in psychology was, uh, yeah, directing this new, uh, center for gambling research, um, which was Funded, um, by the, the provincial government in, in British Columbia, um, along with the British Columbia Lottery Corporation.

Um, and this center really, you know, had a, had a mandate to, um, to really be focused on understanding, you know, the nature of gambling and gambling harm.

Um, and yeah, we're, we're now sort of 12 years into, uh, into the center and, you know, the, the vast majority of the research that I do is in this space now.