Publications by authors named "Lawrence Hoc Nang Fong"

Article Synopsis
  • Gambling disorder (GD) is a type of addiction that really affects people's mental health and how they get along with others.
  • Researchers wanted to see how people's beliefs about their gambling problems (called illness representations) are linked to how well they control their gambling.
  • They surveyed 589 adult gamblers and found four different groups based on their beliefs, with the "rational" group showing the best control and the least problems, while the "weak-perception" group struggled the most with responsible gambling.
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Many casinos diffuse a pleasant ambient scent into their facilities as a customer experience management practice, but the ethics of this scenting process is questionable. Although the effect of a pleasant scent on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses has been well-documented, its effect on attention during gambling has yet to be explored. Grounded in the tenets of the top-down control of attention and cross-modal correspondence between vision and olfaction, we conduct two eye-tracking experiments that involve different electronic casino games including video slots and live Cussec.

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Background: Despite the demonstrated association between empathy and gambling at the behavioral level, limited neuroimaging research on empathy and gambling disorder (GD) has been conducted. Whether and how the brain network of empathy and that of gambling interact in disordered gamblers has not been investigated. This study aimed to address this research gap by examining the hierarchical organizational patterns, in which the differences of causal interactions of these networks between disordered gamblers and healthy controls were revealed.

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Segmentation of gamblers is useful for understanding their distinctive characteristics and enforcing customized measures in harm minimization work. Previous research has commonly adopted gambling motivation and involvement as segmentation criteria. However, these criteria are less identifiable through observation.

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Cognitive bias is prevalent among gamblers, especially those with gambling problems. Grounded in the heuristics theories, this study contributes to the literature by examining a cognitive bias triggered by the break streak pattern in the casino setting. We postulate that gamblers tend to bet on the latest outcome when there is a break-streak pattern.

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Gambling is a leisure activity, which is enjoyed by many people around the world. Among these people, Chinese are known for their high propensity to gamble and are highly sought after by many casinos. In this exploratory study, the effect of two types of fallacy bias-positive recency and negative recency-on the betting behavior of Chinese gamblers is investigated.

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