The associative underpinnings of negative urgency and its role in problematic gambling behavior

Negative urgency -the tendency to lose control under the influence of strong negative emotions- has been proposed to be a sign of malfunctioning emotion regulation mechanisms, and to contribute to severity and complications of gambling disorder and other externalizing behaviors.

This study is aimed at (1) testing whether negative urgency is linked to resistance to extinction in an emotional associative learning task in a sample of 70 participants, 65 of whom were active gamblers (with emotional pictures as unconditioned stimuli, and color patches as conditioned stimuli [CS]); and (b) exploring the link between these two variables (negative urgency and resistance to emotional extinction) and clinical manifestations of gambling (severity and craving). Mixed-effects generalized models were used to analyze trial-by-trial predictive responses during acquisition and extinction for erotic, disgusting, and gambling-related pictures.

Acquisition of CS-elicited responses remained unaffected by negative urgency, whereas extinction was hampered in individuals with high negative urgency, especially for CSs associated with erotic and gambling-related pictures. Moreover, negative urgency predicted higher craving scores, and these predicted more severe gambling-related symptoms. This finding resonates with the well-known involvement of emotion regulation processes in craving control. However, extinction was not independently related to craving. This lacking effect suggests that negative urgency is a broad construct, and although some of its components are directly related to faulty extinction (and generalized emotion dysregulation), such components are not the same negative urgency shares with difficulties of craving control.