Pathological gambling is defined “as a chronic and progressive failure to resist to impulses to gamble, and gambling behavior that comprises, disrupts, or damages personal, family, or vocational pursuits (American Psychiatric Association, 2000;pp. 1-19).” Gambling happens when a person stake an item of value without the assurance of winning through engaging in different gambling activities including lotteries, electronic gaming machine, casino games, racing, cockfighting, card games, and sports betting. In the study of Delfabbro and Le Couteur (2009), they classified gambling into three categories; betting and wagering, gaming, and lottery style games. In betting and wagering, gamblers put their bets or wager in games like sporting event and race. While in gaming, gamblers placed their bets on games with pre-determined rules like gaming machines and casino games. In lottery style games like scratch tickets, it award prizes based on the selected winning symbol or combination of numbers. However, these gambling activities provide negative effects to gamblers which in return give benefits to gambling operators (Rickwood, Blaszczynski, Delfabbro, Dowling and Heading, 2010). In the survey led by the Commission on the Review of the National Policy (1974), …show more content…
With these, there are a lot of reasons why people continue to gamble despite of its negative effects. In the study of Shead and Hodgins (2009), they broadly classified the causes of chronic gambling into two types: the desire for positively reinforcing subjective excitement and arousal; and the desire for the negatively reinforcing relief or escape from stress or negative emotional states. Both social and monetary reward expectancies facilitate gambling due to the learnt association with, and capacity to enhance or regulate positive affect (Shead and Hodgins,