2025 · 27th National Clinical Education Symposium · Turkish Journal of Psychiatry · presented
Bekdemir F, Özdin S, Satılmış B, Aydın Öztemel R, Bolat R, Ünsal Çelebi D · doi:10.5080/kes27.abs62
Personality, impulsivity and gambling-related cognitions in gambling disorder
Gambling disorder is usually treated as one behavioural category. This study looked at three things together in the same patients: personality traits, impulsivity, and the beliefs people hold about gambling itself. It asked how each of them relates to how severe the disorder is.
Forty-three patients presenting to the Ondokuz Mayıs University psychiatry clinic and to the AMATEM clinic at Samsun Mental Health and Diseases Hospital between October 2024 and February 2025 took part; 40 were men, mean age 32.7 ± 8.5 years, and they had started gambling at 26.7 ± 8.3 on average. Severity was measured with the South Oaks Gambling Screen, cognitive distortions with the Gambling-Related Cognitions Scale, impulsivity with the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale short form, and personality with the Eysenck Personality Inventory, alongside PHQ-9 and GAD-7. Approved by the Ondokuz Mayıs University Clinical Research Ethics Committee (2025/27).
Severity correlated with one specific distortion, the belief that chance outcomes can be interpreted or controlled (r = 0.326, p = .040). Age of onset correlated negatively with gambling-related expectancies (r = −0.427, p = .006) and with the lack-of-planning facet of impulsivity (r = −0.341, p = .031): people who began gambling later expected less from it and scored as more planned than those who began young.
The published conclusion is that age of onset may mark different clinical forms of the disorder, later-onset gambling looking like the more isolated kind, and that cognitions are worth treating as a target. These are correlations in a single clinical sample, so they describe a pattern rather than establish a mechanism.
This work sits apart from the computational thread running through the rest of the research pages. It came out of clinical service, not the modelling programme. It shares neither its method nor its question.