Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2016
Amplified Striatal Responses to Near-Miss Outcomes in Pathological Gamblers.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural mechanisms of behavioral addiction: An ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Pooled it
- Striatal dopamine D2/D3 receptor regulation of human reward processing and behaviour.Nature communications · 2025Trial
- Effects of dopamine and opioid receptor antagonism on the neural processing of social and nonsocial rewards.Human brain mapping · 2024Trial
- Trial
- Gambling Disorder as a Behaviorally Driven Systemic Medical Condition: From Reward Circuitry to Multi-System Morbidity.Clinics and practice · 2026Review
- Parsing Reward Processing Substages With Multimodal EEG-fMRI.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Impulsivity, Critical Thinking and Near-Miss Role for Persistence in Play on a Slot Machine.Journal of gambling studies · 2025Article
- Associations Between Taq1A/C957T Polymorphic Variants and Autonomic Responsivity in a Slot Machine Task: Influence of Real-Life Gambling Exposure and Sex.Journal of gambling studies · 2025Article
- The neural vulnerabilities in reward processing in gambling disorder.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Power and Gambling: Dispositional Power Predicts Persistence on a Computerized Scratchcard Task.Journal of gambling studies · 2024Article
- Neurotransmitters crosstalk and regulation in the reward circuit of subjects with behavioral addiction.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Review
- Gambling and virtual reality: unraveling the illusion of near-misses effect.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Dynamic expectations: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of sub-second updates in reward predictions.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Dynamic expectations: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of sub-second updates in reward predictions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Autonomic responses during Gambling: the Effect of Outcome Type and Sex in a large community sample of young adults.Journal of gambling studies · 2023Article
- Potential Biological Markers and Treatment Implications for Binge Eating Disorder and Behavioral Addictions.Nutrients · 2023Review
- Development and Validation of a Near Miss Scale for Assessing Gambling Tendency.Journal of gambling studies · 2022Article
- Using pharmacological manipulations to study the role of dopamine in human reward functioning: A review of studies in healthy adults.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Scratch Card Near-Miss Outcomes Increase the Urge to Gamble, but Do Not Impact Further Gambling Behaviour: A Pre-registered Replication and Extension.Journal of gambling studies · 2020Article
- Neurophysiological Correlates of the Near-Miss Effect in Gambling.Journal of gambling studies · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Near-misses in gambling games are losing events that come close to a win. Near-misses were previously shown to recruit reward-related brain regions including the ventral striatum, and to invigorate gambling behavior, supposedly by fostering an illusion of control. Given that pathological gamblers are particularly vulnerable to such cognitive illusions, their persistent gambling behavior might result from an amplified striatal sensitivity to near-misses. In addition, animal studies have shown that behavioral responses to near-miss-like events are sensitive to dopamine, but this dopaminergic influence has not been tested in humans. To investigate these hypotheses, we recruited 22 pathological gamblers and 22 healthy controls who played a slot machine task delivering wins, near-misses and full-misses, inside an fMRI scanner. Each participant played the task twice, once under placebo and once under a dopamine D2 receptor antagonist (sulpiride 400 mg), in a double-blind, counter-balanced design. Participants were asked about their motivation to continue gambling throughout the task. Across all participants, near-misses elicited higher motivation to continue gambling and increased striatal responses compared with full-misses. Crucially, pathological gamblers showed amplified striatal responses to near-misses compared with controls. These group differences were not observed following win outcomes. In contrast to our hypothesis, sulpiride did not induce any reliable modulation of brain responses to near-misses. Together, our results demonstrate that pathological gamblers have amplified brain responses to near-misses, which likely contribute to their persistent gambling behavior. However, there is no evidence that these responses are influenced by dopamine. These results have implications for treatment and gambling regulation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.