Personality Disorders and Erroneous Beliefs in Pathological Gambling

This study investigated the extent to which pathological gambling and gambling-related erroneous beliefs are related to personality disorders and the general dysfunctional beliefs that are common to these disorders. Respondents were recruited from the general community by advertising in community newspapers in southern Australia. Participants were asked to contact the researchers and were administered a short screening telephone interview to ensure that volunteers met study criteria. A package of measures, a consent form and other related information were mailed to them for self-completion. Once this was returned, participants were again interviewed by phone to validate their responses and finalise data collection. The sample comprised 140 regular gamblers who were recruited from the general public. A variety of self- report and semi structured questionnaires were administered, including the NORC DSM-IV Screen for Gambling Problems, The 21-item PDI (Peters et al. Delusions Inventory), the PAI-BOR measure of borderline personality disorder and the Gambling Related Cognition Scale (GRCS). Pathological gambling scores were strongly related to scores on borderline personality disorder measure as well as gambling-specific belief scores. A path analysis showed that personality disorders are only weakly related to gambling-related belief after controlling for delusion-proneness. In other words, there is evidence of a pathway between personality disorder scores, delusion-proneness scores and Gambling Related Cognition Scale scores which, in turn, are positively associated with pathological gambling scores. Dysfunctional beliefs associated with common personality disorders such as borderline personality may make people more susceptible to the gambling-related erroneous cognitions commonly held by pathological gamblers.