Mindfulness has been defined as a conscious attention to and awareness of the internal and external stimuli that accompany one’s immediate experience (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Mindful attunement to current experience is accomplished by processing both internal and external information in an unbiased, non-distorted manner (Brown & Ryan, 2004b), allowing individuals to meet situational demands with adaptive responses instead of automatic, rote, and habitual reactions (Bishop et al., 2004). Mindfulness is an inherent human capacity, though individuals vary in the extent to which it is expressed. As a modern psychological construct, mindfulness was originally derived from Buddhist psychology, although it shares conceptual kinship with experiential modes of processing described by a variety of Western philosophical and psychological traditions (Brown, Ryan & Creswell, in press). Indeed, it is the experiential basis of mindfulness that distinguishes it from analytic modes of processing (Teasdale, 1999), including those reflected in concepts such as private self-consciousness, rumination, self-monitoring, and the need for cognition (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Although empirical research on mindfulness is nascent, researchers have tied dispositional mindfulness to various markers of self-regulation and psychological well-being, including better self-control, higher emotional intelligence, and lower depressive symptoms, anxiety, neuroticism, and rumination (Brown et al., in press).

Several lines of evidence suggest that mindfulness may also contribute to understanding risk-taking behavior, and attenuating the severity of gambling outcomes. First, mindfulness is fundamentally an attentional construct involving the ability to attend to specific stimuli, including one’s overt actions, while simultaneously avoiding ensnarement in unwanted thought patterns, emotional reactions, and sensory distractions. This link between mindfulness and attention is noteworthy given demonstrated associations between attentional and self-control difficulties (e.g., attention deficit disorder), risk-taking, and gambling problems (e.g., Specker, Carlson, Christenson, & Marcotte, 1995). Second, mindfulness concerns non-evaluative, or objective attention and awareness. The ability to observe and act without biased judgment suggests enhanced emotion regulation (Brown & Ryan, 2004a; Hayes & Feldman, 2004), which serves to attenuate the occurrence of maladaptive, unwanted, and affect-laden preconceptions and behaviors through enhanced self-regulation capabilities (Creswell, Way, Eisenberger, & Lieberman, in press; Shapiro & Schwartz, 2000). Accordingly, mindful awareness may enable self-controlled and proactive behavioral responses, rather than the impulsive and avoidant reactivity that often accompanies PG. Third, evidence suggests that mindfulness enhancement contributes productively to the treatment of disorders that tend to co-occur with PG, including depression (Teasdale, 1999), anxiety (Kabat-Zinn et al., 1992), and self-control disorders (Witkiewitz, Marlatt, & Walker, 2005). Importantly, increasing gamblers’ objective awareness of the cognitive, behavioral, and affective components that relate to PG is central to many clinical approaches to its treatment (Petry, 2005). Collectively, these considerations suggest that mindfulness may inhibit the impulsive and addictive components of PG.

In the present research, we extend the exploration of the personal, social, and clinical relevance of mindfulness by examining its relation to the severity of gambling outcomes and the judgment and decision-making processes that accompany them. In Study 1 we examined the relation between dispositional mindfulness and PG, and assessed whether this relation remained when controlling for other relevant variables, including general self-control capacity and frequency of gambling activity. In Study 2 we examined potential judgment and decision-making mechanisms that could explain the relation between mindfulness and PG, specifically mediated through performance on two laboratory-based risk-taking tasks. To better represent individuals with active gambling-related pathology and increase the ecological validity of this research, we sampled frequent gamblers in both studies.

In the GGT, participants first complete a confidence calibration task by answering 100 two-alternative general knowledge questions and assessing their confidence in each answer using a 50% to 100% scale. Confidence is assessed such that, among answers in which one expresses 80% confidence, 80% should turn out to be correct. If this is achieved, the average confidence over all trials equals the proportion of questions answered correctly. Overconfidence is calculated as the difference between average confidence and accuracy across the question set. In the next phase, participants accept or reject a bet on each answer that is fair (having zero average value) if confidence is well calibrated. For example, if participants express 80% confidence in an answer, the offered bet would award 100 points if correct, but penalize 400 points if incorrect. If participants are overconfident, accepting bets systematically results in negative point totals. Previous research has established the relevance of GGT performance to the severity of gambling outcomes, where higher reports of PG relate directly to overconfidence and bet acceptance, and inversely with point totals (Goodie, 2005; Lakey et al., in press).

The IGT is a contingency card-choice task in which participants choose from among four decks. Two decks offer large wins, which intermittently are accompanied by even larger losses, leading to negative average outcomes. The other two decks offer smaller gains, which sometimes are accompanied by even smaller losses, leading to positive average outcomes. Initially, Bechara et al. (1994) found that patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage continually chose from the disadvantageous decks, whereas non-lesioned controls learned over 100 trials to avoid those decks. Successful performance is contingent upon learning to avoid the risky decks and choosing from the safe decks, which is accomplished through the aversive emotional responses tied to the large losses associated with the disadvantageous decks (Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000). The interpretation of perseveration among non-lesioned participants is that they are willing to continue choosing from disadvantageous decks because of a myopic focus towards large wins. Researchers have used this task to delineate among groups with heightened risk-taking propensities, including those with substance addiction disorders (e.g., Bechara & Damasio, 2002), and individuals with PG (Lakey et al., in press).

Clearly, the GGT and IGT are not designed to assess gambling per se, as neither involves wagers for real money. Instead, these tasks measure differences in cognitive processes that underlie gambling and other risky activities. Indeed, in the Lakey et al. (in press) study of frequent poker players, those who frequently opted for risky decks on the IGT also displayed greater overconfidence, accepted more bets, and ultimately earned fewer points on the GGT. Moreover, both of these tasks uniquely predicted higher reports of PG. To date, no research has documented a link between mindfulness and performance on the GGT and IGT. We argue, however, that such a link is plausible. As mindfulness entails enhanced attentional and self-regulatory capabilities that facilitate meeting situational demands adaptively (Brown et al., in press), the biased judgments that lead to overconfidence and risk-willingness captured by the GGT, and the tendency to maintain an indiscriminate focus on reward in the IGT, suggest lower levels of dispositional mindfulness are operative. With this in mind, we hypothesized that the relation between mindfulness and PG would be accounted for (i.e., mediated), at least in part, by participants’ performance on these tasks.