Understanding the links between anxiety, depression, and sports betting: The mediating role of sports betting motivations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sports betting has grown in popularity in recent years in the US and Canada, and is now a major form of gambling. In the present research, we examined which motivations for sports betting mediated the association between emotional vulnerabilities (i.e., anxiety and depression) and sports betting and gambling problems. We recruited sports bettors in Ontario, Canada (final N = 915; 77.2 % men) and categorized them as in-play bettors (n = 221), single-event bettors (n = 531), and traditional bettors (n = 163). Participants completed an online battery of questionnaires measuring depression, anxiety, sports betting behaviour, problem gambling, and sports betting motives. Analyses showed that depression and anxiety were highly correlated in this sample of sports bettors. Both depression and anxiety were associated with greater gambling problems, and these associations were mediated primarily through coping motives. On the other hand, mediation analyses showed that depression and anxiety were associated with greater sports betting frequency primarily through enhancement motives. We also found that the associations did not differ significantly for type of sports betting, nor did they differ between men and women. These results demonstrate that depression and anxiety may be more likely to be comorbid in those who partake in sports betting, and that coping motives are related to gambling problems in sports bettors. Thus, our findings support the pathways model of problem gambling, suggesting that interventions for those who primarily engage in sports betting should focus on comorbid depression and anxiety, and should bolster coping styles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".