Impulsivity, emotion regulation, cognitive distortions and attentional bias in a spanish sample of gambling disorder patients : Comparison between online and land-based gambling

The whole sample consisted of 88 treatment-seeking patients diagnosed with GD according to DSM-5 criteria [61], who were, for the first time, attended to at the Behavioral Addictions Program of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona (Spain). The period of the recruitment was between September 2018 and September 2019. The current study was linked to the duration of a project funded by ONCE's Fourth International Grant for Research on Responsible Gambling, Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles-ONCE.Several risk factors have been related to the onset and maintenance of gambling disorder (GD). The aim of this study was to explore the differences in emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, cognitive distortions, and attentional bias between online and land-based gamblers. The sample consisted of 88 treatment-seeking patients from the Behavioral Addictions Unit at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, Barcelona (Spain). Patients were divided into two groups by considering their main type of gambling, i.e., online (n = 26) and land-based gambling (n = 62). Online gamblers were younger, more often employed, with a higher educational level than land-based gamblers. Regarding the rest of the variables, statistically significant differences were only found in Positive Urgency, one of the UPPS-P subscales, in which the land-based gambling group scored higher than the online gambling group. In this exploratory study, individuals with online and land-based GD phenotypes did not differ either in difficulties in emotion regulation or in attentional and cognitive biases. However, land-based GD patients showed a higher tendency to succumb to strong impulses under the influence of positive emotions. These preliminary findings warrant the need to continue investigating GD phenotypes in larger patient samples