Drawing on the available research literature on the cognitive distortions present during gambling, a typology of gambling-relevant cognitive distortions is presented. These include the magnification of gambling skills, minimization of other gambler's skills, superstitious beliefs (including talismanic, behavioral, and cognitive superstitions), interpretive biases (including internal attributions, external attributions, gambler's fallacy, chasing, anthropomorphism, reframed losses, hindsight bias), temporal telescoping, selective memory, predictive skill, illusion of control over luck (including luck as an uncontrollable variable, luck as a controllable variable, luck as a trait variable, luck as a contagion), and illusory correlation. In addition, gambling-relevant beliefs about the self are also discussed, including entitlement, omnipotence, cognitive reasoning, and magical thinking.

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This study investigated natural recoveries (self-change) from alcohol problems, and overcame several methodological problems that affected the few previous studies of this phenomenon. Three groups of individuals who had resolved an alcohol problem without treatment were interviewed about their drinking history, life events that occurred during the year prior to their resolution, and factors that helped maintain their resolution. As a control for prevalence of life events, a control group of nonresolved, nontreated alcohol abusers were interviewed about events in a randomly selected year. Collaterals were interviewed for all subjects. No life event or constellation of events was differentially associated with the resolutions across the three resolved groups or differentiated the resolved and nonresolved groups. Interviews with resolved subjects were qualitatively analyzed-the majority (57%) of recoveries were characterized as involving a "cognitive evaluation" or appraisal of the pros and cons of drinking. Spousal support was reported by the greatest number of resolved subjects as having helped them maintain their resolution. Findings from this study may provide direction for developing new treatment strategies and for accelerating self-change among problem drinkers in the community. The study also demonstrates the importance of using a control group, without which very different conclusions might have been drawn.

The legalization and availability of new forms of gambling are increasing in most Western countries. This trend has contributed to the fact that more individuals are developing gambling problems. As a result, there is a need for effective treatments. Although gambling treatment dates several decades, few empirically supported treatments for pathological gambling have been developed. This critical review includes only controlled treatment studies. The primary inclusion criterion was randomization of participants to an experimental group and to at least 1 control group. Eleven studies were identified and evaluated. Key findings showed that cognitive-behavioral studies received the best empirical support. Recommendations to improve gambling treatment research include better validated psychometric measures, inclusion of process measures, better definition of outcomes, and more precise definition of treatments.

We believe that these guidelines are broad enough to allow clinical research conducted from diverse perspectives to allow valid cross study evaluations of intervention studies. Such conditions will facilitate the development of empirically validated best practice guidelines for use by clinicians in the management of problem gambling.