More Than Money: Experienced Positive Affect Reduces Risk-Taking Behavior on a Real-World Gambling Task.

Previous research indicates that when people participate in multi-trial games of chance, the results of previous trials impact subsequent wager size. For example, the "house money" and "break even" effects suggest that an individual's risk-taking propensity increases when financially winning losing during a gambling session. Additionally, the "mood maintenance hypothesis" and affect regulation hypothesis suggest that people in positive and negative affective states are less and more likely to gamble than when in neutral affective states, respectively.

A fallacious "Gambler's Fallacy"? Commentary on Xu and Harvey (2014).

In their recent article in Cognition, Xu and Harvey (2014) suggested that people who placed wagers on an online gambling site demonstrated very different wagering preferences depending on whether they were on winning or losing streaks. Specifically, they reported that people on winning streaks were more likely to win their subsequent wagers because they chose increasingly "safer," higher-probability bets as the win streak continued. People on losing streaks were more likely to lose their subsequent wagers because they chose "riskier," lower-probability wagers as the losing streak progressed.