The role of alexithymia, boredom, desire thinking, and subjective risk intelligence in individuals with gambling disorder: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to explore the association between alexithymia, boredom, desire thinking, and subjective risk intelligence in individuals with gambling disorder (GD).METHODS: A total of 94 participants (47 disordered gamblers and 47 control subjects) completed the following questionnaires: Toronto Alexithymia Scale -20 (TAS-20), Multidimensional State Boredom Scale (MSBS), Desire Thinking Questionnaire (DTQ), Subjective Risk Intelligence Scale (SRIS).RESULTS: The subjects with GD fall within the borderline range of the TAS-20 scores, with higher scores in the dimension of difficulty in identifying feelings (M=20.04, SD=7.25 vs. M=14.09, SD=2.68, P<0.001; d=1.08) and in the externally oriented thinking style (M=25.45, SD=2.95 vs. M=21.15, SD=5.33, P<0.001; d=0.99). Furthermore, the GD group has high scores of boredom and desire thinking than the control group. Finally, GD subjects showed lower SRIS total scores than the control ones, although the difference between the two groups was not statistically significant (M=65.45, SD=9.87 vs. M=68.34, SD=4.51, P=0.07; d=0.37). All variables investigated in the study were significantly correlated in the clinical group whereas no statistically significant correlations were shown in the control group.CONCLUSIONS: This study seems to confirm that alexithymia, boredom, subjective risk intelligence, and desire thinking are strictly related in participants with GD. More specifically, the cognitive processes involved in desire thinking have an important role in the onset and maintenance of GD and need further investigation. Furthermore, this study underlines an interesting relationship between subjective risk intelligence and alexithymia in gamblers, which has not yet been adequately investigated in the literature on the topic. For this reason, our data represent an important starting point for future studies on this point.