Loss-chasing is strongly associated with impaired control over gambling behavior (Lesieur, 1979) and has the effect of accelerating gambling involvement, increasing affected individuals’ financial liabilities but, at the same time, diminishing the financial resources available to meet them. Thus, loss-chasing is a significant precipitant of pathological gambling’s adverse familial, social, and occupational consequences (Corless and Dickerson, 1989b). Despite the centrality of loss-chasing to pathological gambling, we know very little about the brain circuits that support it. Identifying its neural substrates might help us to understand how the brain dysfunctions within mesolimbic pathways recently identified in samples of pathological gamblers can contribute to the disorder’s clinical presentation (Potenza et al., 2003; Reuter et al., 2005).
