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Youth at Stake: Alexithymia, Cognitive Distortions, and Problem Gambling in Late Adolescents

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of alexithymia and cognitive distortions in adolescent gambling. Five hundred and forty-six Italian high school students, between the ages of 17 and 19 years, were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen Revised for Adolescents (SOGS-RA), the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Gambling Related Cognitions Scale (GRCS). Results showed that problem gamblers scored highest on the GRCS and the TAS-20 scales. First-order correlations indicated strong positive associations among SOGS-RA and all GRCS subscales, as well among SOGS-RA and the TAS-20 factors, Difficulty Identifying Feelings and Difficulty Describing Feelings. The results of hierarchical regression analysis showed also that, along with gender, the most powerful predictors of gambling involvement were the GRCS subscales, Inability to Stop gambling and Interpretative Bias, and that SOGS-RA scores were moderately associated with the TAS-20 factor, Difficulty Identifying Feelings only. Mediation analyses revealed a significant indirect effect on the relation between alexithymia and gambling severity through specific gambling-related biases.

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Notes

  1. We are very grateful to Prof. Tian Oei, who gave us permission to use the GRCS scale.

  2. For the psychometric properties of the Italian version of SOGS-RA and TAS-20 see [9, 42], respectively.

  3. The SOGS-RA is a modified version of the South Oaks Gambling Screen [43]. The construction of the SOGS-RA included rewording of several items from the SOGS to accommodate adolescent experience and reading levels, and the number of scoring items was reduced from 20 to 12.

  4. More specifically, the distributions of GRCS total and all GRCS subscales scores were positively skewed. As regards to the alexithymia measure, the distributions of the dimensions Difficulty to Identifying Feelings and Difficulty to Describing Feelings were positively skewed, whereas the distributions of the total TAS-20 and the subscale Externally-Oriented Thinking scores were negatively skewed.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a research grant from the Department of Psychology of the Second University of Naples awarded to Marina Cosenza.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Second University of Naples, Viale Ellittico, 31, 81100, Caserta, Italy

    Marina Cosenza, Ivana Baldassarre, Olimpia Matarazzo & Giovanna Nigro

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  1. Marina Cosenza
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Correspondence to Giovanna Nigro.

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Cosenza, M., Baldassarre, I., Matarazzo, O. et al. Youth at Stake: Alexithymia, Cognitive Distortions, and Problem Gambling in Late Adolescents. Cogn Comput 6, 652–660 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9274-z

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