Neural cue-reactivity in pathological gambling as evidence for behavioral addiction: a systematic review.

Increasing incidence of problem gambling has led to prioritizing the problem from the point of view of public health. Additionally, gambling disorder has been recently classified as a behavioral addiction, with implications for both its diagnosis and treatment. However, the shared neural substrate of addictions, to substances and behavioral, is still discussed. Thus, this systematic review aims to provide up-to-date knowledge from the past five years (2017-2022) concerning the neural correlates of gambling related stimuli (cue-reactivity) on the basis of a previous review (Brevers et al., Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience 18:718-729, 2019). A total of five studies were included in the review. Activation of brain areas related to memory, reward and executive functions could be the underlying mechanism of this behavioral addiction. Specifically, nucleus accumbens and striatum (ventral and dorsal), parahippocampal regions, the right amygdala and several prefrontal cortex regions have systematically been found more active in those subjects exposed to gambling-related cues. Also, the insula could play a pivotal role connecting these three systems in a highly integrated neural network with several implications for reward processing modulation, associative learning and top-down attentional regulation to improve saliency of addiction-related cues. These results are consistent with previous findings on other substance addictions, such as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or cocaine. The study of neural reactivity to stimuli related to addiction could be useful as a biomarker of the severity of the disorder, the efficacy of the treatment, the risk of relapse, in addition to being an objective criterion to measure the effectiveness of prevention campaigns.

The moderating role of aggressiveness in response to campaigns and interventions promoting anti-violence attitudes.

This research indicates that a critical factor for understanding the success or failure of anti-violence campaigns is the aggressiveness of the target audience. We propose that person and situation interact in predicting post-intervention attitudes toward violence, fighting expectations, and intentions to learn how to use real guns. Across two studies conducted in different countries and with different age populations, we found that anti-violence campaigns were effective, only for those for whom the message was already pro-attitudinal (low trait aggressiveness). In contrast, for individuals with relatively higher scores in trait aggressiveness, there was no difference in attitudes toward violence between those who received the anti-violence intervention and those assigned to the control group. In fact, the anti-violence messages resulted in a boomerang effect, increasing the favorability of attitudes toward violence in one of the studies. Aggr. Behav. 42:471-482, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.