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Online gambling poses novel risks for problem gambling, but also unique opportunities to detect and intervene with at-risk users. A consortium of gambling companies recently committed to using nine behavioral "Markers of Harm'' that can be calculated with online user data to estimate risk for gambling-related harm. The current study evaluates these markers in two independent samples of sports bettors, collected ten years apart. We find over a two-year period that most users never had high enough overall risk scores to indicate that they would have received an intervention. This observation is partly due to characteristics of our samples that are associated with lower risk for gambling-related harm, but might also be due to overly high risk thresholds or flaws in the design of some markers. Users with higher average risk scores had more intraindividual variability in risk scores. Younger age and male gender were not associated with higher average risk scores. The most active users were more likely than other users to have ever exceeded risk thresholds. Several risk scores significantly predicted proxies of gambling-related harm (e.g., account closure). Overall, the current Markers of Harm system has some correctable limitations that future risk detection systems should consider adopting.

Online sports wagering is a popular and still growing gambling activity around the world. Like other types of gambling, it can lead to problems that include devastating financial, social, and health-related harms. The first analysis of actual online sports wagering activity (LaBrie, LaPlante, Nelson, Schumann, & Shaffer, 2007) suggested that levels of financial and time involvement were more moderate than anticipated from earlier survey studies. However, these findings are now more than a decade old. The current study examined actual online sports wagering activity of a similar cohort of 32,262 online gamblers from 2015 to understand how sports betting might have changed in ten years. Measures included subscriber characteristics, betting activities, and transactional activities. Online sports wagering behavior was similar to what was found a decade ago, with the majority of subscribers exhibiting modest to moderate, and a small subset exhibiting disproportionately high engagement, transactional activity, and in-game betting. These findings suggest that further investigation of individual trajectories of sports wagering behavior and engagement with different types of sports wagering products is merited.

Researchers and gambling operators have developed game-based responsible gambling tools and interventions that are intended to mitigate risks for gambling-related harm. We conducted a scoping review of this literature, with a focus on replicability and transparency. We charted 86 studies on characteristics such as study design and sample size. No tools or interventions had unambiguous evidence of efficacy, but some show promise. Pre-registration of research hypotheses, methods, and analytic plans was absent until 2019, reflecting a more recent awareness of open science practices. Published studies also inconsistently reported effect sizes and power analyses. Finally, we observed that the replicability of the responsible product design literature is uncertain but could be low. Specifically, entering each study’s primary result into a z-curve analysis—a tool for quantifying the replicability of a body of literature—revealed some evidence of publication bias based on statistical significance. Greater transparency and precision are paramount to improving the evidence base for responsible product design to mitigate gambling-related harm.

In response to a noxious stimulus on the abdomen, caterpillars lunge their head towards the site of stimulation. This nocifensive “strike” behavior is fast (∼0.5 s duration), targeted, and usually unilateral. It is not clear how the fast strike movement is generated and controlled, because caterpillar muscle develops peak force relatively slowly (∼1 s) and the baseline hemolymph pressure is low (

In response to a noxious stimulus on the abdomen, caterpillars lunge their head towards the site of stimulation. This nocifensive 'strike' behavior is fast (∼0.5 s duration), targeted and usually unilateral. It is not clear how the fast strike movement is generated and controlled, because caterpillar muscle develops peak force relatively slowly (∼1 s) and the baseline hemolymph pressure is low (2 kPa). Here, we show that strike movements are largely driven by ipsilateral muscle activation that propagates from anterior to posterior segments. There is no sustained pre-strike muscle activation that would be expected for movements powered by the rapid release of stored elastic energy. Although muscle activation on the ipsilateral side is correlated with segment shortening, activity on the contralateral side consists of two phases of muscle stimulation and a marked decline between them. This decrease in motor activity precedes rapid expansion of the segment on the contralateral side, presumably allowing the body wall to stretch more easily. The subsequent increase in contralateral motor activation may slow or stabilize movements as the head reaches its target. Strike behavior is therefore a controlled fast movement involving the coordination of muscle activity on each side and along the length of the body.