Abstract:

Objectives: Online football gambling is a relatively new game in Nigeria. Like other gambling games, some psychological profiles either propel or sustain the behaviour. We tested some neuropsychological profiles and personality traits that distinguish the regular online football gambles from healthy control group (Non-gamblers). Method: Using a between group design, we tested 140 (60: online gamblers; 80: Healthy controls) university undergraduate students between the ages of 18 – 26 years on some neuropsychological domains (attention, inhibition and executive function) and personality traits. The neuropsychological tasks used were the Series Addition Task (a modified version of Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT), Stroop-Word Colour test and Trail Making Test (TMT) A & B. The personality traits were assessed using the Big Five Personality Inventory. Result: The findings showed significant differences between the online football gamblers and the healthy controls on four personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience, with the online football gamblers performing better than the healthy controls. However, in the attention tasks, the healthy controls made less significant errors on forward addition and backward subtraction tasks but took more time to complete the backward counting task. On the other hand, the online football gamblers performed better on time taken to complete the stroop congruence task and errors made on stroop incongruence. Similarly, the online football gamblers took less time to complete the TMT B and made less errors on TMT A. Conclusion: University undergraduate regular online football gamblers demonstrate stronger personality traits of ambition and gregariousness, and as well show promising capacity on tasks of executive function but however show deficits on tasks of divided and sustained attention.