While it is true that we learn a lot about psychological illnesses by studying how they are the same, we can also, perhaps, learn more by testing how they might be different. One possible example of this is the tendency for almost-winning (or near-misses) to promote further play in pathological gamblers (Clark et al., 2009). Loss-chasing may be another. Patients with bipolar disorder, substance users, alcoholic individuals and pathological gamblers all exhibit impairments in decision-making, and these impairments can predict relapse in both substance users (Green et al., 2009b) and pathological gamblers (Blanco et al., 2009). However, the kinds of decisions that these clinical populations find challenging may differ. In the case of pathological gambling, the most obvious faulty choices involve decisions to keep gambling to recover previous losses, as “loss-chasing.”
