Lindner Philip, Ramnerö Jonas, Ivanova Ekaterina, Carlbring Per
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Centre for Psychiatry Research, Karolinska Institutet & Stockholm Health Care Services, Stockholm County Council, Stockholm, Sweden.
Front Psychiatry. 2021 Feb 5;11:571954. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.571954. eCollection 2020.
Online gambling, popular among both problem and recreational gamblers, simultaneously entails both heightened addiction risks as well as unique opportunities for prevention and intervention. There is a need to bridge the growing literature on learning and extinction mechanisms of gambling behavior, with account tracking studies using real-life gambling data. In this study, we describe the development and validation of the Frescati Online Research Casino (FORC): a simulated online casino where games, visual themes, outcome sizes, probabilities, and other variables of interest can be experimentally manipulated to conduct behavioral analytic studies and evaluate the efficacy of responsible gambling tools. FORC features an initial survey for self-reporting of gambling and gambling problems, along with several games resembling regular real-life casino games, designed to allow Pavlovian and instrumental learning. FORC was developed with maximum flexibility in mind, allowing detailed experiment specification by setting parameters using an online interface, including the display of messages. To allow convenient and rapid data collection from diverse samples, FORC is independently hosted yet integrated with the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk through a reimbursement key mechanism. To validate the survey data quality and game mechanics of FORC, = 101 participants were recruited, who answered an questionnaire on gambling habits and problems, then played both slot machine and card-draw type games. Questionnaire and trial-by-trial behavioral data were analyzed using standard psychometric tests, and outcome distribution modeling. The expected associations among variables in the introductory questionnaire were found along with good psychometric properties, suggestive of good quality data. Only 6% of participants provided seemingly poor behavioral data. Game mechanics worked as intended: gambling outcomes showed the expected pattern of random sampling with replacement and were normally distributed around the set percentages, while balances developed according to the set return to player rate. FORC appears to be a valid paradigm for simulating online gambling and for collecting survey and behavioral data, offering a valuable compromise between stringent experimental paradigms with lower external validity, and real-world gambling account tracking data with lower internal validity.
在线赌博在问题赌徒和娱乐性赌徒中都很流行，它既带来了更高的成瘾风险，也带来了预防和干预的独特机会。有必要将关于赌博行为学习和消退机制的不断增长的文献与使用现实生活赌博数据的账户追踪研究联系起来。在本研究中，我们描述了弗雷斯卡蒂在线研究赌场（FORC）的开发和验证：一个模拟在线赌场，在其中可以对游戏、视觉主题、结果大小、概率和其他感兴趣的变量进行实验性操作，以进行行为分析研究并评估负责任赌博工具的效果。FORC具有一个用于自我报告赌博及赌博问题的初始调查问卷，以及几款类似于常规现实生活赌场游戏的游戏，旨在允许进行巴甫洛夫式和工具性学习。FORC的开发考虑到了最大的灵活性，允许通过使用在线界面设置参数来详细指定实验，包括消息显示。为了方便从不同样本中快速收集数据，FORC是独立托管的，但通过报销密钥机制与流行的众包平台亚马逊土耳其机器人集成。为了验证FORC的调查数据质量和游戏机制，招募了101名参与者，他们回答了一份关于赌博习惯和问题的问卷，然后玩了老虎机和抽牌类游戏。使用标准心理测量测试和结果分布建模对问卷和逐次试验的行为数据进行了分析。在介绍性问卷中发现了变量之间预期的关联以及良好的心理测量特性，表明数据质量良好。只有6%的参与者提供了看似较差的行为数据。游戏机制按预期运行：赌博结果呈现出预期的有放回随机抽样模式，并且围绕设定百分比呈正态分布，而余额则根据设定的玩家回报率发展。FORC似乎是模拟在线赌博以及收集调查和行为数据的有效范式，在外部效度较低的严格实验范式与内部效度较低的现实世界赌博账户追踪数据之间提供了有价值的折衷方案。
