What Role Do Maladaptive Coping and Escape Expectancies Play in the Relationship Between Stress and Problem Gambling? Testing a Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

Stress has long been implicated in relation to problem gambling and gambling disorder. However, less is known about the psychological processes that link stress to problem gambling through other known correlates, including outcome expectancies and maladaptive coping. The current study tests a moderated mediation model whereby the effect of stress on problem gambling was hypothesized to be mediated by escape outcome expectancies, with this mediation effect moderated by maladaptive coping. Participants (N = 240; 50.2% male, Mage = 32.76 years; SDage = 11.35 years) were recruited from an online crowdsourcing platform and provided responses on the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21; Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995), the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI; Ferris & Wynne, 2001), escape subscale of the Gambling Outcome Expectancies Scale (GOES; Flack & Morris, 2015) and the Brief COPE (Carver, 1997). The model was tested using Hayes’ (2018) PROCESS macro, revealing a significant moderated mediation effect of the stress-escape path by maladaptive coping, showing that the effect was significant when maladaptive coping was high. The findings provide support for escape outcome expectancies as being a potential mechanism through which the stress-problem gambling relationship may operate specifically, influenced by how gamblers are engaged in maladaptive coping generally. There is a need to further investigate the potential for combining gambling outcome expectancy challenges with methods to reduce maladaptive coping or develop more adaptive responses in the face of stress among problem gamblers.

A moderated mediation analysis of the quality of life, gambling craving, escape expectancies and gambling disorder relationships.

“…Thirdly, using self-report measures in the present research exposes the data to individual level bias due to social desirability. This defect could be corrected by future research by including other variables in the explanation of the GQoL-GD relationship including stress and erroneous cognition that have shown plausible mediator and/or moderator in literature (Caudwell et al, 2024;Buen and Flack, 2022). Finally, the present study can be expanded in the future by examining how family cohesion, and perception of gambling close relatives in uence the associations described herein.…”

“…Participants (aged 18+ years) were recruited via Microworkers -an online crowd sourcing site (https://www.microworkers.com) and directed to complete anonymous survey designed to understand reasons why people gamble. This procedure has been adopted by recent research (Caudwell et al, 2024). In order to eliminate any potential confounders such as country-level differences in gambling characteristics, the sample frame was set to sample Nigerian residents.…”

“…According to Caudwell et al (2024), one common approach to understanding a given action/behavior is to examine the motives and anticipated outcomes derived from engaging in the act. In regards to GD, a range of motives and outcome expectancies have been ngered in literature, including to improve personal income (Hagfors et al, 2022), to socialize (Flack and Morris, 2015), and to escape from poverty and low economic status (Caudwell et al, 2024;Greer et al, 2023).…”

“…According to Caudwell et al (2024), one common approach to understanding a given action/behavior is to examine the motives and anticipated outcomes derived from engaging in the act. In regards to GD, a range of motives and outcome expectancies have been ngered in literature, including to improve personal income (Hagfors et al, 2022), to socialize (Flack and Morris, 2015), and to escape from poverty and low economic status (Caudwell et al, 2024;Greer et al, 2023). Noted that various gambling speci c motives and expectancies are associated with gambling involvement, gambling to escape from low economic status and to improve quality of life appears especially crucial GD (Caudwell et al, 2024).…”

“…In regards to GD, a range of motives and outcome expectancies have been ngered in literature, including to improve personal income (Hagfors et al, 2022), to socialize (Flack and Morris, 2015), and to escape from poverty and low economic status (Caudwell et al, 2024;Greer et al, 2023). Noted that various gambling speci c motives and expectancies are associated with gambling involvement, gambling to escape from low economic status and to improve quality of life appears especially crucial GD (Caudwell et al, 2024). For example, gambling to win money and escape from poor life have been found to account for variations in problem gambling scores over time (Lelonek-Kutela and Bartczuk, 2021: Richardson et al, 2023).…”